Knowledge Sharing and Creating Process in a Social Development Project: Developing a Model for Intra-Project Knowledge Management

Abstract

This research investigated the sharing, experimenting and creating process of knowledge in a social development project implemented by Dhaka city, Bangladesh with the assistance of Japanese government. Most of the international cooperation organizations such as the World Bank are interested in inter-project knowledge management but less in intra-project knowledge management. These organizations mainly focus on storing and sharing of knowledge centering on their headquarters, but not reach out to each one of their projects. However, knowledge is presented, shared, experimented, and created in the field of each project. Conducting a fieldwork and using qualitative research methods, the author closely observed the knowledge process of the project and found that the knowledge was created through the interaction of optimizing and satisfying, rationalistic plan and incremental plan, universal knowledge and local knowledge, and learning and reflecting. Based on these findings, this paper presents a model of knowledge management in a social development assistance project, which was named “PAR model”, a spiral process model of three phases of Planning, Acting, and Reflecting.