Document(s) 2 of 7

IDRC’s Board of Governors is itself a unique partnership for development: noncitizens help to govern a Canadian public corporation.While the Chair and 11 of the 21 Board members must be Canadian citizens, the remaining positions ensure that the perspective and experience of developing countries will be represented.

At its inaugural meeting in October 1970, the Board approved a mandate that underscored IDRC’s uniqueness.

Recognizing that developing countries might also be “aid weary” for “being too long a supplicant suffering the donor’s quiet arrogance and … implicit denial of sovereign quality,” IDRC offered collaborative partnerships with “a confidence that [the partners], not [IDRC], are the best judges of what is relevant to their circumstances … content to leave direct management of our support in the hands of … partners, reserving to [IDRC] only the rights of audit and periodic substantive review.” In other words, the Board risked its resources in countries marked by extreme poverty and by rudimentary research and education infrastructure, countries burdened with colonial and/or donor-dominated origins, and countries subject to the power, pervasiveness, and rapid change of external science and technology.

Regional offices established in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America ensured that the Board had first-hand knowledge of its terrain.

Meanwhile, IDRC staffed four program divisions. The two in the natural sciences — Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition (including forestry and fisheries) and Population and Health — received the larger portion of resources. Even with IDRC’s bold perspective on research partnerships, these found a ready fit with national and international agriculture and health research activities.

The establishment of the Social Sciences and Human Resources Division was controversial. It was seen as diverting funds better used in the search for technical fixes to known problems —
a criticism that was answered with an emphasis on applied social sciences. Funding locally designed and managed social science required a deft touch in order to gain support from a wider range of actors outside the research community, especially in political and bureaucratic circles.

The decision to establish the Information Sciences Division was innovative and anticipated the importance that information and communication technologies would come to have for development. From the outset this division steadily established its reputation, as it promoted the partnership dimension and provided funds to assist efforts in data collection, coding, and distribution.

IDRC’s support for research rewarded the risks taken in countries that already possessed the personnel and institutions, as was often the case in Latin America and Asia. In countries not so endowed, particularly in Africa, IDRC focused on building capacity — that is, training individuals and strengthening institutions and infrastructure — as a longer-term investment in self-directed development.

Multicountry networks emerged as a hallmark of IDRC’s approach. When more experienced researchers mentored their collaborators, networks helped build capacity. Networks fostered comparative research that strengthened data collection and analysis. As vehicles for disseminating results, networks enabled IDRC to make research findings available to a wide range of actors: to other researchers, to policymakers, and to community leaders. In their most advanced form, networks encouraged researchers to create whole new disciplines when “usable knowledge” required contributions from many specialties.

Because the program work complied with the Board’s mandate — that is, to downplay the donor role, to let the researcher come to the fore — IDRC by the end of the 1970s had gained international respect in the developing regions. At home, meanwhile, it remained one of “Canada’s best kept secrets.”

Next: Agile and Flexible

Document(s) 2 of 7