How the world is shaped by the ‘clash of ignorances’

• One of the themes concerns the faltering instruments of government in many countries of Asia and Africa.
• Governments everywhere should reflect the will and the aspirations of all their peoples.

AS I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT the challenge of international development and its relationship to education, I have come to identify four key areas of concern.

These are issues which have engaged the Aga Khan Development Network for over two decades, including the innovative curricular planning of our schools and universities.

The first of these themes concerns the faltering instruments of government in many countries of Asia and Africa.

Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kenya and Uganda, for example, are plagued by dysfunctional constitutional frameworks which ignore inherited traditions, poorly apportion responsibilities among central versus provincial authorities, fail to ensure equity and liberty for minority and tribal communities, and are unresponsive to their vast rural populations.

We are facing years and even decades of continued testing among various forms of democratic governance. At the present moment, we may well be seeing more failures than successes.

I feel strongly that students of government from across the world can help address this situation, suggesting a creative range of constitutional options and best practices in places where governmental systems have not yet had time to mature.

And educational institutions at all levels should give more attention to the disciplines of comparative government.

This does not mean the imposition of political systems from outside. But it is not enough to replace coercion from beyond one’s borders with coercions from one’s own capital city. Governments everywhere should reflect the will and the aspirations of all their peoples.

One central challenge here is that age-old traditions of the countryside often seem unrelated to the challenges of running a modern nation-state — and plugging it into a changing global economy.

Reconciling the global and the local, the urban and the rural, the regional and the national, is one of the great political challenges of our times.

We have also learnt that simplistic systems don’t work; whether built around the arrogance of colonialism, the rigidities of communism, the romantic dreams of nationalism, or the naive promises of untrammelled capitalism. But I do believe old governing methods can be improved, and that appropriate, effective new models can be created.

The second topic is the role of civil society in development. By civil society I mean an array of institutions which operate on a private, voluntary basis, but are driven by public motivations.

They include institutions dedicated to education, to culture, to health, and to environmental improvement; they embrace commercial, labour, professional and ethnic associations, as well as institutions of religion and the media.

EVEN WHEN GOVERNMENTS ARE fragile, or even nearly paralysed in their functioning, strong civil society organisations can advance the social and economic order as they have done in Kenya and Bangladesh.

Civil society is a complex matrix of influences, but its impact can be enormous, especially in rural environments, where, for example, the need for stronger secondary as well as primary schools is dramatically evident. We have also learned that effective civil progress involves a multiplicity of inputs and a variety of partners — including universities.