Changing the International Discourse on Knowledge and Knowledge Societies for Sustainable Development

This article is part of two series: KM & SDGs campaign and KM in international development.

By Sarah Cummings, Bruce Boyes, Denise Senmartin, Fitsum T. Habtemariam, Gladys Kemboi, Rocio Sanz, Andreas Brandner, & Chris Zielinski.

• In September 2024, the United Nations (UN) and its Member States revisited the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the Summit of the Future.
• The outcome document of the Summit, known as the Pact for the Future, was launched as a zero draft in January 2024, and a series of public consultations and revisions took place prior to the Summit.
• The RealKM-KM4Dev-K4DP knowledge management (KM) and SDGs campaign, which was led by RealKM’s Bruce Boyes, aimed to influence the Pact for the Future to include more pluralistic understandings of the role of knowledge and sustainable development.
• Our paper “Changing the International Discourse on Knowledge and Knowledge Societies for Sustainable Development: From ‘Transforming Our World’ to the ‘Pact for the Future'” published in the journal Sustainable Development employs critical discourse analysis to consider whether the advocacy campaign was successful. Namely, whether discourses relating to knowledge and knowledge societies have changed between ‘Transforming our World’, published in 2015, and the ‘Pact for the Future’, and whether these changes might be due to the advocacy campaign.
• Although there is evidence that discourses related to knowledge have become more pluralistic in the Pact for the Future, there is little to directly connect this with the advocacy campaign.
• However, the prominence given to local and Indigenous knowledge could be a direct effect of the campaign’s efforts or, at least, demonstrate that the discourse on knowledge and sustainable development has moved on since 2015.
• Also, in the time since the writing of our paper, the 2024 campaign has laid foundations for further advocacy by RealKM in its new phase of the campaign. This new advocacy has so far resulted is the 2024 campaign journal editorial “We urgently need multiple knowledges to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals” being listed as a scientific reference that the 2027 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) should consider.

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