This document discusses opportunities and challenges for digital knowledge sharing in supporting sustainable development. It notes that the world is increasingly hyper-connected, multi-polar, and involves many actors. The Sustainable Development Goals aim to tackle underlying causes of poverty and integrate environmental and social issues, but implementation faces risks. The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) is aligning its work with the Goals through research, knowledge sharing, and engaging partners globally. IDS works on three defining challenges: reducing inequalities, accelerating sustainability, and building secure societies. Digital knowledge sharing is important across IDS's work on high-quality research, knowledge co-creation, evidence mobilization, open access, and networking to support transformation toward more just and

1. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
Opportunities and challenges for digital knowledge-
sharing in a new global development era - an IDS
perspective
Melissa Leach
Presentation to Eldis Anniversary event
September 15th 2016

2. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
Global
interconnections
Local, people
focus
A hyper-connected, multi-polar and multi-actor world…..
Reducing inequalities

3. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
Reframing development
• From a narrow poverty focus to navigating
complex inequality, unsustainability and insecurity
challenges;
• Shocks, stresses, uncertainties, surprises
• From north-south aid framings to universality;
• From incremental change to transformation;
• From knowledge transfer to mutual, multi-way
learning

4. The SDGs – a transformative
agenda to meet the challenges?

5. An ambitious agenda, different from the MDGs
• Developed through broad, inclusive consultation
• Tackle underlying causes, not just symptoms
• Integrate people and planet
• Aim to re-invigorate international co-operation on basis of
global challenges
• Universal framing
Major opportunities to shape transformative, sustainable
development pathways – locally, nationally, globally
But also risks – more of the same, silo-ed approach to separate
policies, failures of implementation and accountability…..

6. www.ids.ac.uk @ids_uk
How is IDS engaging?

7. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
• New strategy – alignment with
transformative ambitions of the
SDGs
• Shaping, constructively
critiquing, and supporting
implementation through
research and knowledge sharing
• Open Knowledge and Digital
Services Unit, Knowledge
Mobilisation and Impact Unit,
new Digital and Technology
cluster
Opportunities and challenges of digital knowledge-sharing……

8. Three defining challenges
www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
Reducing
inequalities
Accelerating
sustainability
Building inclusive
and secure societies

9. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming

10. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
• Rising inequalities everywhere - high, middle and low income economies
• Multiple and intersecting dimensions of inequality – economic, political,
social, spatial, cultural, environmental, knowledge (World Social Science
Report 2016)
• Digital inequalities – new digital divides, unequal contributions to global
digital knowledge
• Untangling mechanisms and consequences
• Transformative policies – from taxation, employment and financial
regulation, to law and forms of social/economic organising
• Transformative politics – top-down and bottom-up

11. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
• Climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and land degradation are all linked,
affecting people across the world
• How urgently-needed transformations towards sustainability can be achieved
• Understanding diverse pathways, and the political-economic and social
processes that facilitate or block them
• Technology, market, state or citizen led – or a combination
• Digital opportunities to track and monitor trends, facilitate and share innovations
for sustainability

12. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
• Dangers, risks and uncertainties from conflict and violence – and
environment, health and economy
• Beyond top-down ‘securitisation’ – diverse experiences and
perceptions of being unsafe and insecure
• Identifying and building inclusive institutions to prepare, mitigate
and respond
• Digital data and platforms for knowledge-sharing in humanitarian
response
• digital governance – opportunities for citizen voice and inclusion,
but can also close down and exclude
Community
theatre
for reconciliation,
Mile 91, Sierra
Leone

13. Responding to this context and challenges -
Engaged Excellence
This is our approach to constructing and mobilising
knowledge, and to teaching and learning for development.
Engaged excellence means that the high quality of our work
(excellence) is dependent upon it linking to and involving
those who are at the heart of the change we wish to see
(engaged).
www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming

14. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
Engaged Excellence
Digital knowledge sharing as core to each pillar, and their links…..

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High quality research
• Interdisciplinary, across social and natural
sciences
• Mixed methods - quantitative and
qualitative, participatory and expert-led
• Visual methods
• Digital research opportunities – crowd-
sourcing, online dialogues

16. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
Co-constructing knowledge – engaging young
people’s perspectives through digital media
Love Matters is committed
to reaching young people
and subverting sexual
and gender stereotypes.
In November 2015,
working with experts on
gender and sexuality from
IDS, they launched the
first Love Matters Music
Award providing young
people in Kenya the
chance to produce songs
on themes related to
pleasure, and sexuality.
‘Working with musicians is an exciting and creative way to shape
and disseminate research messages. Using the questions that
young people ask to on-line sex-educators to communicate with
young people off-line, grounds sex education where it matters.‘
Pauline Oosterhoff, IDS Fellow.

17. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming
Mobilising evidence for impact –
The Ebola response Anthropology Platform
Long-term knowledge mobilised in real-
time
40+ briefings
70+ documents uploaded
Direct advice and dialogue with
international, national and humanitarian
agencies
Engagement with field operations

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Mobilising knowledge with technology –
commitment to openness, and to raising the
profile of marginalised voices

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Network of global partners

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Transformation – and wider post-2015 politics
• Multi-levelled, multi-actor politics of transformation; building
alliances for change
• Universalism
• Opening political space
• Roles for digital knowledge-sharing in mobilising for change,
evidence-based advocacy

21. www.ids.ac.uk Engaging, Learning, Transforming since 1966
IDS 50th Anniversary
Eldis 20th Anniversary
Looking back to look forward
Conference 5-6 July ‘States, Markets and Society: charting a new era for
global development’
Opportunities and challenges in taking digital knowledge-sharing into
the next era?