Connecting ICTs to Development: The IDRC Experience
Pamela Y. Abbott · Brunel University Research Archive (BURA) (Brunel University London) · 2014
Although the editors speciacally deny that this book is a historical account,1 it only narrowly escapes that label. The book does attempt to consolidate some 15 years of International Development Research Centre (IDRC)–sponsored action research on ICT intervention projects undertaken in three main global regions, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. This “Herculean” (the editors’ words) effort does give the book the semblance of an epic, engrossing, all-encompassing exposition of the key concerns, actors, and events relevant to the IDRC’s ICT4D community. The book reports on the work of an IDRC-created thematic grouping identiaed as “Information and Communications Technologies for Development” (ICT4D), an acronym which has since gained widespread appeal in the academic research community (Heeks, 2006). ICT4D has also become associated with research that makes a technologically deterministic assumption of a clear link between investment in ICTs and development outcomes (Raiti, 2007). Such critiques have led to attempts to redeane the academic aeld in a broader sense, incorporating all studies that consider ICTs in a development context (Burrell & Toyama, 2009) or in developing countries (Avgerou, 2008). A key differentiator claimed by this book is that the IDRC’s ICT4D research agenda was about ICTs for development not on development,2 i.e., about harnessing the capabilities of ICT interventions to advance a development agenda by working closely with beneaciary communities. Hence, IDRC’s objectives were to enable new ways of working (e.g. new modes of production, new ways of creating value) that would be embedded in local practices. This explains the book’s two-pronged approach, focusing arst on policy change to enable access, then on new ICT-enabled practices (work, communication, services). This approach aligns well with calls for ICT4D research to consider a “broader political economy of developmental ICT” (Thompson, 2008, p. 2) and to investigate sustainable approaches to ICT-enabled developmental projects (Mansell & Wehn, 1998). One such approach in the development literature and ICT4D research area may rest with community participation (Bailur, 2007). The book also attempts to map out the IDRC-speciac ICT4D research aeld which, the author of the introduction to Part I admits, initially comprised a “hastily assembled, rapidly grown, multidisciplinary team of development professionals” (Elder et al., 2013, p. 17). The collection succeeds in highlighting the complexity of such an undertaking, but this has already been a highly debated topic of scholars in the aeld (Burrell & Toyama, 2009). The primary audience for this book includes two groups: ICTD (to use the broader concept) academics and