Networking for Development

The chapter is about the importance of networking activities in building successful and sustainable international development cooperation (IDC) experiences. The reasoning starts from the consideration that, while society is going through a deep change process and is moving towards a network model (the so-called network society), international development cooperation still seems to adopt models and practices that were conceived for an industrial society. A brief review of the most common critics to IDC shows that increasing the level of networking and knowledge-sharing could contribute to effectively tackling the main inadequacies and challenges that IDC is facing. In turn, this would also help networking for development studies to find their place both in academic and in non-academic research and to be taken in greater account by policy makers. The concept of “networking for development”, introduced in the central part of the chapter, is analyzed from different angles: first by defining the actors that should be involved and the mechanisms that should be put in place, second by reasoning on the added value of networking and on the ways to demonstrate its potential impact on IDC, and finally by mapping the relevance of the issue in a some donors’ strategy.