Mike Powell

IKM Emergent

When the World Bank launched its Knowledge for Development Report in 1998, it had the technocratic premise that the knowledge needed to achieve development existed and that the challenge was to disseminate and apply it. It is now clearer than ever that development is a social process which requires active and intelligent participation across society. The SDGs envisage new social realities. This implies the need for new relationships, new dynamics and new knowledges.

Thus, whilst formal research, technical knowledge remain central, achieving the goal requires knowledge processes which support local knowledge dynamics. They must recognize the contribution of lived experience to understanding local realities, provide cognitive pathways to access, assess and adapt external knowledge, and, above all, relate to local cultural, epistemic and political expectations in ways which build lasting engagement and support.

Such processes will be formed by the purposeful interactions of many institutions and people. They will inevitably be iterative and emergent and need to be managed as such. Creating value from multiple knowledges with different roots poses new challenges. Contestation and dispute are intrinsic to knowledge production and use, as are the discovery of commonalities amongst difference. It cannot be that anything goes or that knowledges and alternative facts are selected to suit preconceived prejudices. Underlying values and intent need to be explicit.

The open, accessible, distributed knowledge ecologies envisaged cannot be centrally directed but they can be supported and connected. This requires investment in the nuts and bolts of information management, in accessible archives and in the development of common technical standards that support mass usage as well as specialists.

Keywords: SDGs, multiple knowledges, knowledge ecologies, emergence