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Originally conceptualized by the philosopher, Miranda Fricker, epistemic injustice—unfair treatment of individuals and groups in knowledge-related and communicative practices—is increasingly being employed to delineate individual and collective injustice in healthcare, information sciences, education and sustainable development. Embedded in many other forms of social injustice and inequality, epistemic injustice is a particularly serious problem for sustainable development, undermining the global community's ability to deal with ‘wicked’ problems. Building on the more conceptually developed, philosophical framework of epistemic injustice and recent research from other fields, this article develops a holistic action-oriented framework of epistemic justice, namely fair treatment in knowledge-related and communicative practices, for sustainable development and beyond. It also adds to the current framework of individual and collective injustice by including a range of new insights on structural and systemic epistemic injustice, such as linguistic injustice and epistemicide.

The article considers the extent to which social entrepreneurship of young women is contributing to sustainable development in Ghana, based on field research conducted between October 2018 and April 2019. Data collection involved a review of the literature and a questionnaire survey of actors within the social entrepreneurship ecosystem in Ghana but is primarily based on the life histories of 13 women entrepreneurs collected using in-depth semi-structured interviews. Social entrepreneurship is undergoing a boom in Ghana which is characterized as having the most entrepreneurs as a proportion of the population globally and with women outnumbering men. Critical discourse analysis was employed to highlight the potential difference between grand narratives of entrepreneurship for development—how it is supposed to work, and how it is working in practice for young women social entrepreneurs in Ghana. The life histories demonstrate that the social entrepreneurship of young women in Ghana does not appear to be contributing to sustainable development because the enterprises yielded small or non-existent economic benefits for the entrepreneurs, demonstrating the limitations of this framework in the Ghanaian context. Indeed, most of the enterprises do not go beyond the ideation stage while the fame of winning social entrepreneurship competitions is used by individuals to build social and symbolic capital for employment by the public sector and the United Nations. In this way, young women are “hacking” social entrepreneurship for their own purposes as it is one of the opportunities open to them but it does not lead to sustainable enterprises. While the social entrepreneurship sector in Ghana is booming, it appears in reality to be a survival activity for women who are subject to gender inequalities and social-cultural harassment.

Non-PR, IFPRI5; 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance; CRP2, Innovation Policy and Scaling (IPS); Transformation Strategies; PIM, CGIAR has considerable experience with private sector engagement in the context of its mission to create sustainable and resilient food, land and water systems, and there is continuing interest and dialogue on this theme within CGIAR and the international development community more generally. The on-going CGIAR reform provides an opportunity to capture those experiences and harmonize strategies under the new structure, as has been acknowledged in the new ‘CGIAR 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy’. Commissioned by the NL-CGIAR Strategic Partnership, this report aims to identify, discuss and evaluate pathways for strengthening collaboration between CGIAR and the private sector to stimulate innovation and the scaling of these innovations in food, land and water systems. The objective is to advance private sector engagement in the CGIAR, based on transparent CGIAR system-wide mechanisms and processes.

This article contributes to the emerging body of knowledge on the role of the private sector in knowledge brokering in international development because very little is known about the role of the private sector. It attempts to validate the findings of the only literature review to date (Kiwanuka et al, In Press) on the subject and other literature on knowledge brokering by consulting international experts in the field of knowledge brokering, identifying policy and research implications. The conceptual lens employed is the ‘extended’ Glegg and Hoens’ (2016) meta-framework of knowledge brokering, in combination with the cognitive, relational and structural aspects of social capital (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998). An online questionnaire survey was distributed to international experts in both the private, public and civil society sectors with some 203 respondents. The questions were developed on the basis of the literature. Respondents from the private sector and their colleagues from the public sector and civil society placed considerable emphasis on opportunities to meet, the existence of personal relationships and brokering by third parties as catalysts to working with the private sector. In addition to developing recommendations for policymakers, the paper has added to the emerging body of academic knowledge on the private sector as an unusual suspect in knowledge brokering and provides a conceptual framework linking social capital to knowledge brokering roles. Policymakers and funders can facilitate cooperation between the private sector and other development actors by creating physical spaces and funding instruments to encourage collaboration with the private sector. One of the novel findings is that the public sector needs to be better prepared to collaborate with the private sector.

The authors employ a systems perspective to investigate how coloniality is manifested in the current academic knowledge system and how we can make progress toward the ‘decolonisation of knowledge.’ We reflect on how individual scholars, located in Western donor countries, who benefit from the coloniality of the current knowledge system, can undermine and contest this coloniality with their research and activism. Although we recognise that decolonisation is an ethical issue, we contend that cognitive diversity represents progress and improvements to our pool of knowledge.

The international development and social impact evidence community is divided about the use of machine-centered approaches in carrying out systematic reviews and maps. While some researchers argue that machine-centered approaches such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, text mining, automated semantic analysis, and translation bots are superior to human-centered ones, others claim the opposite. We argue that a hybrid approach combining machine and human-centered elements can have higher effectiveness, efficiency, and societal relevance than either approach can achieve alone. We present how combining lexical databases with dictionaries from crowdsourced literature, using full texts instead of titles, abstracts, and keywords. Using metadata sets can significantly improve the current practices of systematic reviews and maps. Since the use of machine-centered approaches in forestry and forestry-related reviews and maps are rare, the gains in effectiveness, efficiency, and relevance can be very high for the evidence base in forestry. We also argue that the benefits from our hybrid approach will increase in time as digital literacy and better ontologies improve globally.

Critical discourse analysis is employed to examine discourses of the private sector within key texts of the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals. Taking a genealogical approach, four discourses are identified in the literature: the dominant, pro-private sector discourse, showing unconditional support for the private sector; the sceptical discourse; the middle-ground discourse with new approaches, specifically designed to leverage development relevance; and the antiprivate sector discourse, which considers that current approaches to the private sector will not be conducive to sustainable development of the global South. The pro-private sector discourse was found to be predominant within the global goals, reflecting the post-Washington Consensus as well as the role of the developed countries and the corporate sector in their formulation. All discourses on the private sector, however, place an emphasis on economic and social development at the expense of the key environmental component of sustainable development.

This article examines the relationship between social capital and the creation and exchange of knowledge for grassroots development. It applies a framework that originated in developed countries to the experimental phase of a successful entrepreneurial development programme, undertaken between 2006 and 2012 in rural Bangladesh. Although generally applicable, the framework’s structural dimensions are further developed and divided into three functional subtypes of social capital (bonding, bridging and linking) following distinct pathways in their contribution to the creation and exchange of knowledge, demonstrating domains where programme participants co-created know-how. In conclusion, a framework representing the links between social capital and knowledge is presented.

Knowledge brokering has a crucial role in the field of international development because it is able to act as a cognitive bridge between many different types of knowledge, such as between local and global knowledge. Much of the research on knowledge brokering has focused on knowledge brokering between research, policy and practice, rather than looking at its wider implications. In addition, there appears to be no literature on the future of knowledge brokering, either within or outside the development sector. Given the apparent absence of literature on the future of knowledge brokering, a discussion group was held with experts in the field of knowledge management for development (KM4D) in April 2017 to consider their opinions on the future of knowledge brokering. Their opinions are then compared to the generational framework of KM4D, developed in a series of iterations by researchers in mainstream (non-development) knowledge management (KM) and KM4D researchers. In this framework, five generations of KM4D with different key perspectives, methods and tools have been identified. Based on the inputs from the experts in the discussion group, the future of knowledge brokering practice in international development appears to resemble practice-based, fourth generation KM4D, while there is some evidence of the emergence of fifth generation KM4D with its more systematic, societal perspective on knowledge. Given that the Sustainable Development Goals are providing a universal framework which is relevant to both organizational and societal KM4D, a new systemic conceptualization of KM4D is proposed which brings both of these strands together in one integrated framework linked to the SDGs. The SDGs also support the call for a new knowledge brokering practice with a greater emphasis on brokering knowledge between organizational and societal actors.