The role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) towards achieving development (ICTD; sometimes referred to as ICT4D) goals, such as education, gender empowerment, health, and poverty eradication has gained a fair bit of traction (United Nations 2005). ICTD is a general expression in which the term ICTs more often refers to new media technologies such as the internet, computer, mobile phone, global positioning system, but it can also mean more traditional media such as radio, television, and landline telephony. Development is generally regarded as the socio-economic progress of the developing world. There are many variations around these themes, as well as multiple labels describing them. It is not necessary to elaborate on the definitional distinctions here (there are other sources for that) because to do so would plunge us into the very trap for which this volume is intended as an aid in avoiding.

There are a number of high-profile academic studies encapsulating the promise of ICTD, such as rural fishermen in southern India, earning less than US$100 a month, using mobile phones to help decide to which of the several nearby markets to deliver their catch in order to get the best available price (Abraham 2007; Jensen 2007). Or the rural internet centre that saved lives by broadcasting news of the impending tsunami by loud-speaker to the local village community, saving them from drowning in a stormy ocean (Subramanian 2005). Or mobile phones in Bangladesh that benefit entire villages to get connected, whilst providing economic value to the woman entrepreneurs that provide the service (Richardson, Ramirez, and Haq). Or of rural midwives in Indonesia that get connected to urban hospitals via JAVA-enabled mobile applications, improving healthcare services to pregnant village women (Chib 2010). These examples of the use of ICTs are spreading rapidly across the developing world; in some cases this is because of the actions of development practitioners and academics that take an interest in such things, but in many cases they are happening in spite of the actions of such people.

ABSTRACT

In general terms, the academic visibility and professional progress of researchers is a process of acculturation and assimilation into specific communities of established researchers and their discourses. Emergent researchers, especially those outside the mainstream of academic institutions and the wider global research community face two problems. Firstly, they are unaware of many of the tacit or assumed expectations, standards and criteria of the global research community. Secondly, this global research community is not monolithic and undifferentiated but is instead composed of many different smaller, and almost mutually exclusive and almost mutually incomprehensible communities. We explore some aspects of this dilemma from the perspective of a specific SIRCA project faced with the discourses of several research communities, those of software development, mobile learning, health education and development studies, and a mentor coming from his own research communities. It becomes apparent that emergent researchers coming from a position of relative isolation need considerable support in deciding the optimal affiliations and associations for their professional development.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last three years, a team at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, working with support and funding from the IDRC SIRCA programme delivered through the Nanyang Technological University's SiRC in Singapore, has worked on a project to enhance health education — specifically sexual and reproductive health education — for rural Khmer youth, exploiting the affordances and ownership of messaging on their lowspecification mobile phones.

The explicit focus of the project in Cambodia and of the programme as a whole has been building research capacity in the poorest countries of South Asia but in fact this specific project and others of its kind stand at the intersection of several different and perhaps divergent or competing discourses. These include the discourses of:

1. Mobiles-for-health (mHealth), part of a wider mobiles-for-development (m4d) discourse

2. ICT for ‘development’ (ICTD), part of a wider discourse around both software and hardware technology development and also the problematic concept of ‘development’ itself

3. […]

The path from research to practice, or vice versa, is neither easy to find nor to follow. Having claimed at the outset that academics and practitioners rarely associate with each other, the output from the research that has been described in this book suggests that there is considerable potential for desirable outcomes if they did. Whilst it is relatively straightforward to identify the potential for practical impact from the SIRCA research projects, it is not so clear-cut when trying to isolate actual influences and even less so when trying to measure them. As a starting point it is probably useful to agree on a typology of research impacts and it is possible to represent them in Figure 15.1.

Academic impact is achieved by publishing papers in scientific journals and then having them cited by other researchers. The publication process ensures that a body of knowledge is created in a central repository; whilst citations are then attempts to build upon that body of knowledge. Knowledge is thus created incrementally, with existing knowledge subject to testing, validation, and criticism. Simultaneously, the centralised knowledge then becomes a source for the training and development of future scientists, who in turn add to the body of knowledge. Whilst this process theoretically exists as a means to continuous improvement, in practice the process often devolves to mere number-counting of publication and citations as indication of quality.

Publications and citations are counted, categorised, and ranked; the more a researcher receives, the better his/her prospects for promotion, tenure and continued employment in the long run, and in the short run, bonuses, grants, and titles are bequeathed on this basis. Increasingly, scientific journals are ranked according to their perceived prestige, and the higher the rank of journal, the more a paper published in it counts towards professional development. A report by a UK parliamentary select committee on peer review concluded, “Representatives of research institutions have suggested that publication in a high-impact journal is still an important consideration when assessing individuals for career progression,” (2011).

EVALUATION

The Singapore Internet Research Centre (SiRC) committed in establishing SIRCA as one of the best ICTD research grant programmes in Asia, commissioned an external consultant to conduct two evaluations during its pioneer round. Given the ambitious objectives of the programme — to enhance research capacity in the region, to create a space for dialogue on ICTD social science research issues, to connect emerging and senior ICTD researchers through a mentorship scheme, and to raise the profile of ICTD work coming from Asia — SIRCA's management was ready to grasp the lessons learned and to implement relevant recommendations that the evaluations proposed. It was also an opportunity for the staff, entrenched in the day-to-day administration of the Programme, to get a big picture of their work.

The first evaluation was formative — it focused on improving the programme — and covered a period of two years and four months, from the programme's inception and conceptualization in March 2008 to July 2010 after SIRCA's second workshop, which brought together mentors and investigators from all countries and serendipitously provided an opportunity to collect data for the evaluation. The evaluator worked with SIRCA's management to select the areas of study, to articulate the uses of the evaluation, to identify the primary users of the evaluation, and to define the key evaluation questions. The Grant Review Process was one area for evaluation because SIRCA's management received feedback about the short review time of proposals which may have affected the application screening process. The Mentorship Programme was the second evaluation area as it was a unique component of SIRCA that went beyond a typical research grant programme. SIRCA embraced a vision of professional support and career formation for emerging ICTD researchers.

The Principal Investigator (PI) was linked to a senior researcher (Mentor) who would provide continuous guidance, support, and direction throughout the project. It was hoped that the Mentee benefited from this interaction with an experienced researcher while gaining confidence and skills to contribute to the field of ICTD through rigorous research, publications, dissemination, and collaboration with the Mentor.

Development projects that focus on the use of information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) often involve multiple persons, organisations, methods, and locations that require multiple stakeholder partnerships to enable project success and sustainability. There is a need to develop practical yet theoretically-grounded studies that illuminate the realities of field-based ICTD projects that involve multiple stakeholders, who are inevitably involved in the process. Despite a growing body of literature particularly focused on an evaluation of impact on beneficiaries, there is a gap in research on stakeholder perspectives. We need to understand the complex interactions at the management, operations, and beneficiary levels that occur in the realms of practice, research, and policy. The objective of this study is to define and examine the perspectives of stakeholders in order to develop knowledge on the management of multi-stakeholder ICTD project partnerships. To do so, we develop and propose the Stakeholder Communication Model, which begins this process of understanding by focusing on communication patterns between and among various stakeholders in ICTD projects.

INTRODUCTION

The spotlight on ICTs for development emerged in the last decades of the 20th century when the Internet and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were developed. The confluence of these two phenomena resulted in “a new tool in search of a purpose” (i.e. the Internet and ICTs), and the MDGs “were new targets in search of a delivery mechanism” (Heeks 2008, p. 27). A sudden bout of projects, programmes and publications, especially in less-developed countries, occurred, and new, larger stakeholders, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international development organisations, entered the fray of development work as these two arenas met.

Unfortunately, the newness of the field led to many problems. Early assessments of the field have criticised it as being Western-centric and economically exploitative of the Southern states (Ojo 2004).

As researchers, we seek to resolve unanswered questions; test answers presented by others and refine our understanding of a given phenomenon. After developing our proposals, gathering and analysing data, we write and submit our articles to scholarly journals hoping for a nod from our peers. When we do get such affirmation, we give ourselves a pat on the back, happy that we have done our share in building knowledge. But have we really? When can we say that the research we do makes a difference? Journals today report impact factor — a number that reflects how many other scholars have cited one's work. Although a decent indicator, has it been widely accepted merely because it is convenient? At the end of the day, shouldn't impact be ultimately assessed in terms of whether our work has reached the people who shape policy and decisions and have actually led to positive change?

Of course, such a question presupposes that government and industry leaders, policy-makers and practitioners actually read academic publications. Yet a criticism sometimes hurled at academics is that our research is isolated from the real world. And our critics are not entirely wrong. Some academics formulate research problems based on a review of literature without input from current realities. They get caught up in dissecting a phenomenon — even when the world has since changed and moved on.

RESEARCH THAT MATTERS

Research as a Knowledge Product

One way to ensure that the research we do matters would be to take some lessons from business management. What if we viewed research as a knowledge product? A basic principle in strategic management is ‘know your market’. Business people will naturally care about providing products and services that are marketable. Applying this principle as researchers, we need to ask ourselves ‘who is our audience?’

ABSTRACT

Climate-related and climate change-related events are causing problems for agricultural communities in many developing countries, and are requiring new practices that enable these communities to adapt. In planning adaptation practices, two quite different data sources have been common — top-down digital sources such as those provided by remote sensing, and bottom-up human sources such as those provided by participatory events. These can be brought together via geographic information systems to produce a more robust guide for adaptational decision-making. This paper reports one such initiative in Central Vietnam which integrated local and external data sources — geographical, economic, political, and agricultural — in order to provide guidance on environmental planning. The paper reports on the transfer from research modelling to environmental practice, and also draws some broader conclusions about data source integration for ICT4D practitioners including the need to re-engineer planning processes rather than simply automate traditional — often narrowly-scientific and top-down — approaches.

ICTs AND CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION STRATEGIES

Although there is still ongoing debate, there seems to be a general consensus that climate change is a reality, and a reality that is causing particular problems for farmers in developing countries (Ospina and Heeks 2010a). There are problems such as the melting of glaciers, flooding, and spread of desertification or of new vector-borne diseases due to changes in temperature (IPCC 2007). In this paper, we will focus on two problems specific to highland farming: landslides and soil erosion.

Of course, these have occurred throughout the history of agriculture, with landslides destroying life, livestock and property as well as agricultural land, and with erosion of two types — soil run-off from gullies and loss of land from river-sides — both impacting availability of good quality agricultural land (Chung et al. 1995; Morgan 2005). However, there is mounting evidence that both landslides and erosion are increasing and will further increase as a result of climate change, particularly due to changes in precipitation patterns (IPCC 2001; Ray and Joshi 2008).

Most Indian families of my generation in Singapore and Malaysia would have had some connection with Subhas Chandra Bose and his struggle for India's independence through the Indian National Army. Even after World War II had ended, and for many years later, Bose's picture took pride of place in our homes.

Following my assumption of duty as Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in 2002, I had several conversations with then-President S.R. Nathan. He noted that, while there were many accounts of Bose's life and wartime exploits, his legacy had not been explored sufficiently and written about. Mr Nathan hoped that this would be done.

It was against this background that I decided to commission a book on Bose which would highlight his contributions to the emergence of nationalist movements in Southeast Asia. I also wanted the book to show how Bose had affected the lives of ordinary men and women living in Malaya.

About ten months ago, I came to know Nilanjana Sengupta. I discussed the idea of her writing the book. Coming from Calcutta, Bose's home town, she had a first-hand feel for the subject in the larger Indian context. What she needed was knowledge of developments in and around Southeast Asia. Reading voraciously, she came up to speed on the subject and completed writing the book in a record ten months. Although this book is very well researched, it is written engagingly for both the scholar and the layman. It brings to life an epic period of Singapore and Malayan history through the iconic figure of Bose and the legacy that he so richly left behind.

I would like to express my appreciation to Nilanjana for working so assiduously on a legendary personality who remains enshrined in the hearts and minds of many. I would also like to thank Rinkoo Bhowmik, another daughter of Calcutta, and the staff of ISEAS Publications Unit for all the hard work they have put into the production of this book.

Nilanjana Sengupta casts her net widely in this ambitious volume exploring the post-war impact of Subhas Chandra Bose on Southeast Asia. Because the study of Bose has been extensively explored by generations of scholars, Sengupta necessarily addresses some familiar ground.

Throughout the volume we hear echoes of his early spiritualism, secularism and egalitarianism. We hear also references to his mother's worship — extending to Bharat Mata [Mother India] — and his fostering of women's political and military roles, in for example his creation of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment. We encounter again his early political role in Calcutta and its extension to his relations with Gandhi and the Congress, preparing him for an even larger stage in Southeast Asia.

We shift to Burma and Malaya and the embryonic nationalism there in the 1920s under colonial rule and a discussion of the Japanese alliance. Subsequently, for a while the scene shifts to the Red Fort Trials in India and their impact on the British Indian army spread across Southeast Asia.

Sengupta discusses Bose's communication and propaganda techniques, his modern understanding of the mechanisms of mass communication, including his awareness of his personal impact. His emotional and absolute commitment to the goal of military liberation was a significant ingredient of his mesmerizing impact on audiences. The Rebellion of 1857 and the martyrdom of the Rani of Jhansi helped to foster his conviction that the military paradigm was imperative.

Sengupta forges new ground in her discussion of Bose's post-war impact on Southeast Asian leadership, the growth of nationalism, and the burgeoning labour union movement. Throughout Southeast Asia, political organizations such as the MPAJA and labour unions grew in each country, as Sengupta details. The consequence was that British and Dutch post-war attempts to reassert their colonial rule were thwarted by resurgent nationalism. The experience of INA veterans, the personal example of Bose's leadership, and the body of officers trained by the Japanese gave the colonial powers a rude awakening. Southeast Asian nationalism was now an established force in Southeast Asia.

Historians will welcome Sengupta's contribution to our understanding of Bose's continuing impact on the political landscape of Southeast Asia.

SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE CONTEMPORARY SCENARIO

Introduction: The Southeast Asian Crescent

As Subhas Chandra Bose made his way through treacherous oceans towards the Southeast Asian crescent, large tracts of this great connected landmass were under the imperial regime of Japan. From Bengal at the Western tip, down through Burma, Thailand and stretching to Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore) on the East, the crescent at one point had formed the commercial heart of the British Asian Empire and would soon be the heartland of INA (Indian National Army) operations. To the common Indian labourer working at the plantations of Malaya or the dockyards of Burma, Subhas Chandra Bose was a comparatively unknown name. Though hailed as something akin to a legend in the nationalist circles of Rashbehari Bose and Mohan Singh, he would have to start afresh and reach out as a populist leader to the large community of Indians present here.

Unlike other parts of Asia, the Southeast had always lacked a single, dominant ethnic group and been diversified in terms of language, culture, religion and even colonial regimes. So while Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam were clubbed together to form French Indo-China, Indonesia had been rechristened the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines formed an isolated little pocket of first Spanish and then American dominion. Thailand, never under Western colonial rule, had however for centuries been economically ruled by British financiers. Earlier, in many senses, this area of Asia had been a “spillover” from the two, more coherent neighbouring regions of India and China.1 Whereas portions of the West and central, maritime Southeast Asia came under “Indian-Sanskritic-Hindu-Buddhist” influences; the cultural base of Vietnam was Chinese with the Chinese form of Buddhism practised here. But the organic unity of this region in terms of spiritual beliefs and cultural practices was torn apart by the early twentieth century as rival European powers began to carve out their own colonial empires.