Sarah Cummings 

Knowledge for Development Partnership and Athena Institute, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Can you imagine that you are in a situation where no one listens to you or believes what you have to say? And the reason they are not listening or believing is because of your race or your gender or where you come from or your accent, or an intersectional combination of all four or more? Or imagine that the knowledge of your community is seen as worthless and ignored, even when the community will suffer most when efforts to change it go awry. As the author, Rebecca Solnit (2017), wrote: ‘If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity.’

In global development and our daily lives, it seems to me that we need to hear the individuals and communities who are not being listened to, as well as putting in place knowledge practices which try to redress the balance. With K4DP and colleagues from KM4Dev, we have been trying to do this with this new edition of the Agenda Knowledge for Development which puts more emphasis on local, Indigenous and First Nations’ knowledges, on countering epistemicide or the death of knowledge, and on greater recognition that sustainable development needs to start with self-determination and local realities.

Keywords: epistemic injustice; sustainable development; knowledge practices