Learning-Systems Approaches for the Right to Knowledge: Highly Accessible Materials for Achieving the SDGs
摘要
While a broad consensus acknowledges that systems approaches are necessary for achieving global aims like the SDGs, less agreement prevails about what approaches will best achieve this aim. This chapter describes how learning-systems approaches for ensuring exercise of the right to knowledge support adaptive, resilient, and fast-responsive strategies for delivering life-sustaining knowledge around food, water, shelter, health, and gender security to billions of people. Specifically, this objective involves leveraging advanced information and communication technologies to create dynamic and interactive learning platforms that people at all scales—from individual change agents to international coalitions—can browse like menus or encyclopedias and select scientifically backed solutions to problems that they recognize locally. Such platforms need to support continuous learning, solution-adaptation, and knowledge sharing, enabling individuals and communities to more resiliently adapt to rapidly emergent challenges and build in capacities to resist shocks in the first place. The critical difference offered by such a learning-systems approach compared to others is feedback at all scales of operation that do not simply change the behavior of the system (the “classical” sign of learning) but can change its structure and purpose as well.