Bruce Boyes

Editor, Lead Writer, and a Director, RealKM Cooperative Limited (RealKM Magazine), China & Australia. Knowledge management (KM), environmental management, and education professional with over 40 years of acclaimed and award-winning experience in Australia and China.

The vital enabling role of knowledge and knowledge management (KM) in sustainable development has long been recognised. Indeed, I have been advocating for and using multiple knowledges approaches in my work for more than 30 years. But now, halfway through the UN’s Agenda 2030, and with the 4th edition of the Agenda Knowledge for Development being published, knowledge and KM are still missing from the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Why? And what should be the response? I see two fundamental issues. Firstly, KM as a professional endeavour evolved primarily from the consulting industry, and to some extent academia. So, the KM community largely lacks the skills and experience in public policy development and change advocacy found in other sectors. To overcome this, the KM community needs to not just promote multiple knowledges approaches, but actively use them through the increased use and facilitation of transdisciplinarity. Secondly, the SDGs will not be achieved by the UN or its Member States, rather by the billions of individuals across the world who need to be able to integrate them into their daily lives. But every one of us has different realities, leading to divergent and often conflicting perspectives, making implementation complex and hard. So, the UN and Member States shy away from the ‘coal face,’ instead issuing detached strategies and plans that are never implemented. Overcoming this requires a radical transformation to embed complexity science in KM for development, drawing on complex adaptive systems expertise from other sectors through transdisciplinarity.

Keywords: transdisciplinary transdisciplinarity complexity advocacy policy