Changing the International Discourse on Knowledge and Knowledge Societies for Sustainable Development: From ‘Transforming Our World’ to the ‘Pact for the Future’

ABSTRACT 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 by two UN member states, Germany and Namibia, and a series of public consultations and revisions took place prior to the Summit. A multi‐pronged, civil society advocacy campaign aimed to influence this outcome document to include more pluralistic understandings of the role of knowledge and sustainable development. Critical discourse analysis is employed to consider whether the advocacy campaign was successful, namely whether discourses relating to knowledge and knowledge societies has changed between ‘Transforming our World’, published in 2015, and ‘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.