On 3 and 4 November, the leaders of the most powerful economies gathered for the G20 Cannes Summit. Apart from focusing on the Euro crisis, the Summit also consolidated the G20 development agenda initiated in Seoul just a year ago.

Embedded in this agenda, there is now a shared vision in the G20 that knowledge sharing is a powerful tool for achieving development results. A partnership of countries and multilateral institutions have worked intensively over the past months to elaborate evidence-based recommendations and best practices.

Southern players, especially the academia, have contributed deep insights and analyses, sending a strong signal to the G20 to take into account the existing capacities at the country level. It is now time to take these forward andscale up knowledge exchange as a full-fledged development tool!

Background

Recognizing the potential of development knowledge sharing, the G20 leaders asked in November 2010 the Task Team on South-South cooperation (TT-SSC) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to come up with policy recommendations and concrete proposals for how to scale up knowledge sharing as a full-fledged tool for development. As a result, Knowledge Sharing has become one of the nine pillars of the Multi-Year Work Plan under the leadership of the G20 Development Working Group (DWG).

 This effort is currently coordinated by a Steering Committee which includes the governments of Colombia, France, Indonesia, Korea and Mexico, as well as the OECD, the World Bank, the UNDP and the Task Team on South-South cooperation. This Steering Commitee is in charge of developing a series of products which are informing the DWG members and the G20 leaders at the highest political level.

Importantly, this work is closed connected to the process around the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, thereby being a pilot experience of how to ensure country-led synergies among two major political arenas of global decision-making on development policies.

• G20 documents on Knowledge Sharing

Scaling Up Knowledge sharing for Development- A Working Paper for the G-20 Development Working Group, Pillar 9 (June 2011) - download pdf here -

This working paper drafted by a group of authors coming from OECD, WB, UNDP and the TT-SSC lays the ground for understanding Knowledge Sharing as a distinct tool for development, which complements financial cooperation and technical assistance. The WP outlines a series of policy recommendations and states best practices around six areas, all of them drawn on case studies conducted by Southern academia under the umbrella of the TT-SSC. This document has been included in the DWG agenda during its meeting in Cape Town on 2 July 2011)

G20 Issues Paper - Emerging Lessons on Institutionalizing Country-Led Knowledge Sharing (October 2011) - download pdf here - 

This document provides a straightforward overview on lessons learned on how countries can create, scale up and consolidate their policy, institutional and operational capacities as partners in knowledge sharing. For example, it offers a first glance on concrete options of building horizontal partnerships and designing implementation models focused on results. Experiences from a number of countries, including Colombia, Honduras, Indonesia and Singapore, have informed this document which will be submitted during the G20 Summit in Cannes, France.

Good Practice Paper on South-South and triangular cooperation (October 2011) - download pdf here -

Informing both the G20 development agenda and the Busan HLF, the Good Practice Paper provides evidence-based guidance on how to ensure quality, effectiveness and sustainability of South-South and triangular knowledge sharing and its capacity to fully contribute to poverty reduction and development results such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). It draws on the findings and lessons of the rich and diverse analytical work gathered under the umbrella of the TT-SSC.

• Process of the Knowledge Sharing pillar

See the mandate of the G20 leaders to the TT-SSC and UNDP [pdf].

See updated information on the work of the Steering Committee of the Knowledge Sharing pillar [pdf]. 

And here is a blog post on the latest meeting of the Steering Committee in Mexico City.