20-22 January 2009
Abu Dhabi, UAE
The multilateral and regional security, financial, trading and regulatory systems and structures created during the post-war era reflect a widely shared recognition that global problems transcend the abilities of individual states and governments to manage them. Yet truly holistic approaches are lacking. The Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations represent a valuable step toward coordination of knowledge and policy, and are oriented primarily around near-term goals for development and poverty reduction. Among those who produce and distribute knowledge, synthetic approaches are increasingly rare.
Few comprehensive attempts to bring together knowledge producers in the various fields in a task-oriented way exist, and some have despaired that this is no longer possible.
By placing thinkers from different spheres together in a delimited, non-political process of substantive exchange, the Agenda seeks to advance the packaging of knowledge for action. The participating thinkers’ individual areas of expertise will serve as the starting point for collaboration, not as the end. The Agenda seeks to intervene on the ‘supply side’ of the problem of coordinating knowledge for use by policymakers and by people. Rather than only asking leaders to aggregate the information they receive into wise policy, or asking people to sort through the mass of information they may receive via mass media, the Agenda calls on knowledge producers themselves to integrate what we know into a more useful and useable view.
The Agenda will assemble a group that might not ordinarily converse to work within a wide temporal, spatial and thematic horizon toward an urgent and targeted goal. The Agenda will not: seek to promote or protest specific groups; begin with a pre-defined set of assumptions; develop a single model of the future; or establish a new institution. The Agenda seeks to loosen organizational and political constraints on thinking, on the premise that the departmentalization that enabled particular areas and domains of knowledge to advance may not suffice to put what we know back together again.
