I sat down the other day with a group of specialists from a Country Team within the World Bank. We were discussing efforts to improve the governance system in that country and how a Program like ours - CommGAP - could help. It was a good meeting and we agreed on a way forward. But several of the specialists in the room raised a common enough challenge. They complained about the poor quality of media reporting and public debate within the country regarding the complex challenges faced by the country. Let's call the country Bubutania. This problem, it turned out, manifests in a number of ways. First, public officials in Bubutania cannot engage the public in a discussion of policy options. They want to, but they do not know how. Second, journalists do not understand complex technical papers and data on the economic and governance challenges facing Bubutania and proposals for reform. Third, as a result, public opinion on the big issues is shallow and uninformed. Government is worried about this state of affairs; donors are worried about it as well. Why? Because in such an environment misinformation triumphs. Public opinion is shaped in less than benign ways; and all that can have dire consequences for reform efforts in Bubutania as well as for the government in power.

This is a common problem. And it is one of the reasons CommGAP argues for the central role of a democratic public sphere within the architecture of good governance in Bubutania as elsewhere. For, it is in the public sphere that the process of debate and discussion, of public deliberation takes place. And whether or not the public sphere in Bubutania facilitates or hampers that process of deliberation on public affairs is, it is submitted, a governance issue. It is partly about access to official information. It is partly about whether or not the media system is diverse and independent. But it is also about the quality of information intermediation. Information intermediation is the subject of this post.

Now, what is information intermediation, and why does it matter hugely? Making the core insights of abstruse, technical fields available to the generality of the public in a political community is what information intermediation does. It is a process of the first importance. Even if you are an expert in your own field, you are a lay person - even an ignoramus - about most other fields of learning. But very often some of the key insights of these other fields are things you need to know in your two roles as a citizen and as a consumer. They enable you to make informed judgements. They help you to make better decisions. For instance, if you want to buy a new car, it is important to know about the key differences in the technical performance of most cars in the category that you are investigating. Automobile engineers have that information. They can interpret the technical literature about cars.  The point is that the ordinary consumer of cars need some of those automobile engineers to have the skills to make the comparative technical data on different cars accessible and palatable to the rest of us. They need to help us to have information we can use in a way that we can use them. Such engineers are a special breed. They are information intermediaries; they are knowledge brokers. They play a crucial role in shaping public opinion and consumer behavior.

Well, efforts to reform economic and political systems in developing countries also need such knowledge brokers. It is clear that the technical work, the data analysis and the studies that lead to a set of policy prescriptions, all these things are beyond the ken of ordinary citizens. Yet we say that we need the buy-in of these citizens, we need them engaged, we want them to act, to demand reform and good governance. It seems obvious that ordinary citizens need to be brought into the picture. They need to know what is going on, what the issues are, what the policy options are, what the costs of inertia are, and what the trade-offs might be. That is the job of knowledge brokers in the public sphere. Some of them will be government officials. Many will be specialists from universities and think-tanks in Bubutania as elsewhere. Some of them will be pundits in the mass media. But all of them will share this characteristic: they will have the skills required to make information or knowledge that is dry, abstract and impenetrable truly accessible and engaging. Then informed public debate might result, and with it, informed public opinion. The point, then, is this: where these knowledge brokers do not exit they have to be created.

So long!

Photo Credit: Eric Miller