Click to enlarge: Network of Hubs
Source: M. Schlögl

In her article 'Recycling bins, garbage cans or think tanks? Three myths regarding policy analysis institutes.' Diane Stone stated that 'However, neither knowledge production nor knowledge exchange is apolitical.' (Stone 2007)

This very simple, but nevertheless important finding implies some consequences for the study I am going to present:

• If we consider all knowledge, no matter who produces it, as political, the often and very intensively discussed definition of Think Tanks seems to be, at least for the determination of our study object, dispensable - if every knowledge production and exchange is political we have to study all organisation working in the field of knowledge production (or in this case, all organisations registered in GDN), no matter if they call themselves Think Tank or University.

• The perception that every knowledge production is political is the main explanation for the importance of studies like the present one. We have to know more about the structures that produce the knowledge upon which politicians settle their policies.

• Maybe even more important is to realize that 'non-knowledge' is political as well (St. Clair 2006: 81). With 'non-knowledge' I mean the possibility to define what is, and what is not knowledge, respectively what is, and what is not relevant knowledge.

For the field of development studies the examination of the Global Development Network seems to be the appropriate method to learn something about knowledge production and the power to define "non-knowledge" within the realm. The GDN is the biggest network of scientific organisations in the field of development studies (Stone 2000: 12). It combines more than 4000 Organisations, 8000 Scientists and 15.000 Papers in its 'Knowledge Base' (I am going to describe the GDN more detailed later on). To use Diane Stones words: '…the GDN provides a lens through which to observe the manner in which knowledge, information and data are used by the development community to inform policy…' (Stone 2000: 4). Not to forget, the GDN Knowledgebase gives us a centralised access to a huge amount of data about scientists, organisations, papers, where they are situated, what their expertise is like and much more. It would be impossible to collect all that information from different websites (e.g. the websites of the organisations). Besides, the GDN is not only a network of organisations, but also a single actor in the field of development research, there are more than 300 papers online available, which arose from GDN sponsored research.
Consequently the research will concentrate on two quite different questions. On the one hand we will examine the Knowledge Base and look through "the lens" on the development community, on the other hand we will have a look at the GDN as a research organisation itself.

As it is impossible to generate the presented data by hand, I used data-mining-techniques to automatically generate it. If you want more information on that techniques please refer to the full text.

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