Defending the Global Knowledge Commons and Advancing People-Centred Development
The article’s headline accurately captures an incredible truism: that local realities, community participation, and people-centric approaches offer considerable progressive potential for realising global development.
Appreciating this axiom requires us to better appreciate each category mentioned within the context of our contemporary conjuncture.
The ‘local’ is not an idyllic, autonomous space but a site of contestation where the contradictions of the world-system are most acutely felt.
People-centric development should therefore actively challenge the very social relations that produce underdevelopment, inequality, and ecological precarities.
We meet at a time of intense geopolitical turmoil, whilst our only home planet faces increased ecological precarities, genocide continues, and the institutional formations of our combined and uneven world systems are being eroded.
This confluence of crises or more accurately “polycrisis,” reflects our combined inability to redress the inherited legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism that continue to reproduce hierarchies of power, wealth, and vulnerability.
The ecological precarity we witness from climate-induced famine to biodiversity collapse is the direct result of the metabolic rift that persists in treating the earth as a ‘free gift’ to be plundered.
The persistence of genocide, most starkly visible in the ongoing atrocities in Palestine, and Sudan are not an aberration but a brutal manifestation of a logic where the lives of the ‘world majority’ are rendered disposable in the pursuit of strategic and economic dominance.
The erosion of international institutional formations, from the UN to the WTO, is not a failure of diplomacy but a reflection of the waning hegemony of a neoliberal order that can no longer contain the contradictions it has unleashed.
It is within this dynamic international context of our contemporary conjuncture that the importance of stressing meaningful public engagement and the mobilisation of people as active agents in development becomes not just important, but existentially critical.
А key aspect of the work is to facilitate and expand learning amongst the countries of the global South.
Core to this objective is to deepen cooperation amongst the countries that constitute the world majority through the sharing of developmental experiences and the expansion of knowledge.
Our contemporary conjuncture is also the result of the epistemic violence of the global North in dictating the developmental paths the global South through prescriptions such as structural adjustment programmes of the IMF to the technocratic advice offered by Western-biased development agencies
The sharing of experiences among South-South partners represents a conscious break from this dependency, an attempt to forge autonomous pathways rooted in shared historical experiences of colonialism and neocolonialism.
In this it is critically important to interrogate what kind of ‘development’ are we sharing? If it is merely a replication of the model that caused the ecological crisis in the first place, we are simply perpetuating the problem.
The expansion of knowledge must therefore be a critical, dialectical process—one that learns not only from successes but also from the failures of past developmental models, particularly those that prioritised GDP growth over human welfare and ecological integrity.
It is on this aspect that we need to be particularly concerned, as we are also witness to a profound attack on the institutions of learning and science.
In an era where knowledge production is the primary driver of value creation, capital seeks to enclose and commodify the intellectual commons just as it enclosed the physical commons in the age of primitive accumulation.
The rise of corporate-funded research, the privatisation of universities, and the patenting of life-saving knowledge are all manifestations of this tendency.
As the BRICS Civil Forum, we have a historic duty to defend the global knowledge commons.
We should encourage open-access publishing, for publicly funded research to remain in the public domain, and for the democratisation of data.
We should resist the transformation of education into a marketable commodity and reclaim it as a fundamental human right and a global public good.
The information and data we generate through our work must be liberated from the shackles of intellectual property regimes that serve only to enrich multinational corporations at the expense of humanity’s collective progress.
To build resilience and to promote what Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’ we should promote socially useful innovation.
Achieving sustainable development in a holistic manner requires that we continue to build deeper collaboration between ourselves, and also amongst all the countries of the world majority.
This collaboration must be based on solidarity, compassion, and empathy and not just the zero-sum logic of the market.
The pursuit of these objectives requires substantial investments in expanding the research frontiers, such as our gross expenditures on research and development.
We must pay more attention to the direction of our public investments as science and technology research and development has often been skewed towards military applications, consumer gadgets for the wealthy, and technologies that automate labour to suppress wages.
We need a fundamental reorientation of our scientific priorities towards the social and ecological good: renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, pandemic preparedness, and the care economy.
The maintenance of high-quality, publicly-funded knowledge institutions affords us the opportunity to learn more about the real and root causes of under-development, whilst also focusing on unleashing the creative potential of our respective populations.
This means moving beyond a narrow, economistic definition of ‘human capital’ and embracing a vision of human flourishing that is collective, creative, and free.
It requires a pedagogy of the oppressed, where communities are not passive recipients of knowledge but active co-producers of it, drawing on their own lived experiences to challenge dominant narratives and co-construct alternative futures.
Realising such a progressive praxis—the unity of theory and action—is within our grasp and is especially required as the polycrises of our contemporary conjuncture deepens.
Ensuring that our development initiatives actually focus on our lived local realities enables opening up our institutions to community participation and empowerment.
This is the essence of a truly democratic planning process. It means shifting power away from distant bureaucracies and corporate boardrooms and placing it in the hands of the workers, peasants, and communities who are the direct stakeholders in their own development.
In advancing people-centric approaches, we must remain alert to the dangers of technology determinism—the false belief that technology alone can solve our problems.
The digital revolution, for all its potential, is currently being deployed to intensify surveillance, deepen inequality, and automate dispossession.
We must critically assess which technologies serve the people and which act against them in increasingly horrific ways.
We must encourage more socialised means of advancing development that works for all.
This means prioritising labour-intensive industries where appropriate, strengthening social safety nets, and, most importantly, fostering a culture of democratic deliberation and collective decision-making.
The BRICS Civil Forum holds these possibilities for the world majority and therefore should do more in encouraging our mutual learning whilst remaining focused on the root causes of our challenges not merely the amelioration of symptoms.
The material was prepared specially for the BRICS Expert Council-Russia
This text reflects the personal opinion of the authors', which may not coincide with the position of the BRICS Expert Council-Russia