Although the term intersectionality is discussed foremost in social justice spheres, in practice it sees use in a number of fields. Intersectionality in development discourses has become increasingly important as the idea of inclusive development-seeking directly to address the issues faced by a number of dispossessed groups-has grown. By allying together, different interest groups can act as more forceful advocates for their agendas in international policy-making. This also reflects how non-state actors, particularly civil society groups, have grown more influential in international politics.
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Intersectionality in Sustainable Development
The main theme of SDG’s is inclusiveness, meaning including the active participation of all sectors of society and all types of people. The SDG’s cannot be achieved without collaboration of all, and an intersectional approach that interconnects social categorizations such as race, class and gender to a given individual or group, as a result creates barriers to an inclusive society.
In 1992 during the Earth Summit, the first UN Conference on Environment and Development, it was acknowledged that achieving sustainable development would need the active participation of all sectors of the society, thus Agenda 21 adopted at the Earth Summit drew up the “UN Major Groups”. To this day, most of the UN processes related to environment and sustainable development use the “Major Groups” framework or some variation, which includes nine sectors of society, as the main channels through which board participation would be facilitated. The nine group include: women, children, farmers, indigenous people, NGO’s, trade unions, local authorities, science and technology, and business and technology. However, the problem with these categorizations is it is missing out major stakeholders, such as the 1 billion persons with disabilities and the older population (estimated[1] by 2050, about 2 billion people will be over 60, 22% of the world’s population). Hence, as a result, lots of identities are not included. However, when advocates argue about the need to expand beyond these nine groups, many appeal to the argument of intersectionality that indicates we deal with these groups under the nine specific groups (For example: women with disabilities as part of the women category). However, to what extent do the category deal with the problem separately concerning people with disabilities or older generations? And to what extent are they successful addressing these groups? While we question on aspect of not including these groups, there is also another perspective- if we add more groups-will it be progressive in achieving all the set forward goals with the multiple representatives (transaction costs)? However, at the same time by excluding a certain group undermines the concept of inclusivity, and thus the SDG’s. In conclusion, while intersectionality exists the issue of exclusion will persist.
[1] http://unsdn.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/gray-panthers.pdf
Inclusive Education
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the main international legal framework on human rights that clearly highlights the rights of children with disabilities to education. More importantly, article 24, on the right to education, emphasizes the rights to inclusive education and prohibits disability-based discrimination in education. Learners with disabilities at all levels of education are one of the most vulnerable communities and exposed to exclusion from educational opportunities. Their vulnerability extents beyond just their enrolment but to issues of quality of education received, retention and progression throughout the school system. The World Report on Disability estimates that there are between 93 to 150 million school-aged children with disabilities worldwide[1]. Therefore, it is important to recognize the importance of international cooperation in including children with disabilities in programming as well as in its role in support of national governments. The inclusion of children with disabilities is a moral issue, as well as an economic and social issue.
Education is the essential part of human existence and a key to power. It’s the core principle in solving challenges such as demographic change, global competition, technological development and other various areas. Human development, a concept evolved by Amartya Sen, is a means in increasing beyond just income or GDP. It also impacts the economic, social and political components. It impacts scientific innovations and introduction of modern technology. It increases opportunities for employment, and resilience to economic shocks [2].
Therefore, a nation with a more educated population has greater chance in innovations and creating more job opportunities. Therefore, the economic and social cost of exclusion are high. Leaving a huge proportion out of the labor market just negatively impacts the long term productivity of the economy. However, investing in inclusive education, enrolment of children with disabilities is a smart investment and carries high returns. It allows to increase labor potential, impacts progress, reduces poverty, inequality and gender inequality.
Inclusive ICT can be a valuable and important instrument for learners with disabilities who are vulnerable to the digital divide and exclusion from educational opportunities.
Some aspects of inclusive ICTs for education include: mainstream technologies that are readily available in the commercial marketplace to all individuals, assistive technologies that take in consideration the difficulties in accessing and using the mainstream technologies, compatibility between assistive technology products, and accessing digital learning content and instructional delivery systems.
By incorporating inclusive ICT, it can reduce the barriers such as social exclusion and access to information through the use of virtual organization and collabotory . There are many actors involved in creating an inclusive ICT environment besides children with disabilities, but also those that are involved in developing, implementing and evaluating policy objectives and initiatives such as the parents, teachers, leaders, and other education professions and the IT professionals. ICT is a cross-sectorial sector.
[1] http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002272/227229e.pdf#page=11
[2] Riboud, Michelle. 2016. Investing in inclusive human development. Global Journal of Emerging Market Economies 8 (2): 168-200.
ICTs and Sustainable Development
The spread of information and communication technology has great potential for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by essentially becoming the facilitators and enablers. By using ICT allows to accelerate human progress, upscale critical services in health, education, financial services, bridge the educational and digital divide, enhance public awareness, bring innovation, connectivity, productivity and efficiency across many sectors. This in result will impact and develop a more knowledgeable and inclusive society. ICT particularly has the potential in enhancing access for vulnerable populations, to information, knowledge, health care and education (for example: Collabotory), which is one of the main themes of SDG- inclusivity. Understanding the importance of ICTs in achieving the global agenda the UN Member States have committed to utilizing ICTs to achieve the 2030 Agenda.
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is a two-phase UN summit that was initially created to evolve a platform that was aimed at addressing the issues raised by information and communication technologies. It was created to discuss and bridge the global digital divide that separates rich nations from poor by spreading access to the Internet in the developing world. The goal of WSIS is to build an inclusive and development-orientated information society where everyone can access and share information. The importance of the summit is that it is a multi-stakeholder process where representatives from member states, UN bodies, international organizations, NGO’s, civil societies and private sectors can participate and discuss the new opportunities of the information technology environment and address challenges, which is an important part of an inclusive society. As these forums allow to include and hear out the marginalized groups that are inhibited from accessing these ICTs. The WSIS+10 outcome document and the UNGA Resolution produced an overall review of the implementation of the summit outcomes in 2015, and recognized the significance of the development of ICT in achieving SDGs.
Inclusive Cities, Habitat III and New Urban Agenda
Cities have been attractors of populations. In cities there are more opportunities, jobs, transportation, close proximity. In cities you experience different cultures, politics. According to the World Bank report about 70% of the world population will live in cities by 2050. Thus, it is essential to make sure that cities provide opportunities and equal living conditions to all, because every individual has a ‘right to the city’.
The New Urban Agenda is the outcome document that was agreed upon at the Habitat III UN conference on housing and sustainable urban development in Quito, Ecuador. The UN conference was the first time in 20 years that the whole international community, led by national governments, collectively took stock of fast-changing urban trends and the ways in which these patterns are impacting human development. In addition, it was the first UN global summit about the adaptation of the 2030 SDG’s. The significance of the conference was that it set a new global standard for sustainable urban development and lets us rethink how we plan, manage and live in cities. It became an opportunity for the whole international community at all levels to harmonize its understanding of the problems by current trends in urbanization. It is roadmap for building cities that can serve as an engine of prosperity and center for cultural and social well-being for all. It also acts as guide to achieve SDG 11. In the NUA, governments are committed to provide basic services for all citizens and ensure that all citizens have access to equal opportunities and face no discrimination, including the most common excluded group– persons with disabilities. PWD make up 10% of the world population, and yet they one of the most marginalized groups with limited access to rights that they deserve. Habitat III was an important achievement for PWD – through engagement in GAP, PWD became an official stakeholder group of Habitat III and impacted the language of the final draft of the NUA (were referenced 15 times). This is a big achievement and a great leap forward not just toward SDG11, but also in promoting and encouraging inclusive policies towards all groups that been to this day excluded.
Including the 15%: a More Complete Development
Development has been historically a matter of whole populations, lifting countries up wholesale in order to improve, in theory, the lives of the poor and disadvantaged. In comparison, Inclusive Sustainable Development focuses on those left behind by previous efforts of development in order to improve their standards of living. In recognizing the different needs of persons with disabilities and other disaffected groups, the paradigm of ICD enables a just and successful way to development. By recognizing that developing for persons with disabilities in mind is a separate process from blindly developing for the general population, inclusive sustainable development creates spaces for persons with disabilities in the discourses around development, giving them a voice to address inequalities and injustices that they experience. The inclusive aspect of ICD creates a more just model of development, and creates a paradigm that is built towards justice.
Defining Development
According to Sen, development is the expansion of what he calls freedoms to all people. This contrasts with more traditional views of development, which consider increases in income and GNP as clear indicators of effective development policies. These two different approaches to development highlight which indicators are given preference when it comes to designing policies. Sen’s approach is to focus on freedoms and unfreedoms. That is removing barriers so that development can be achieved. Examples of unfreedoms are poverty, tyranny, limited economic and educational opportunities and social deprivation. Sen argues that in the process of reducing the unfreedoms, inputs like increasing income or GNP becomes more valuable. This alternative approach to development stresses that traditional methods take on a new role as a means to expanding freedoms instead of being their own separate solutions for achieving development.
There are three inter-related views of development that these two different approaches can use for their framework: long-term, short to medium-term, and development as discourse. These three different views are all different approaches to development policy. Sen’s approach fits into two of the three categories: long-term and development as discourse. The alternative approach challenges the standard perceptions of development and pushes the development community as a whole to consider different methods. By thinking of development in terms of Sen’s freedoms and unfreedoms, policy makers are able to create more innovative solutions to development challenges.
The level of development can different between countries in a specific region and even within a country itself. Cities often receive most of the development, industrialization and innovation in the developing world, and it is then hoped that the benefits of the urban development will then spread out into the rural areas. The wide range of development makes it difficult to enact any one-blanket policy and hope all aspects of the issue will be solved. Different regions of a country have different development challenges that need their own nuanced solutions. The same is true for similar areas in different parts of the world. The communities might earn the same amount of income and perform similar work, but what works in one area might not work in another. This could also be another challenge of thinking of development policy in terms of income or GDP. While Sen’s idea of unfreedoms and capabilities might not be a traditional approach, it could allow for policy makers and other actors to find more realistic solutions to solving development problems.
Grand Challenges in Development
Grand challenges are large-scale problems and challenges that require multifaceted approaches to solve. One famous example of a grand challenge is the moon landing, hence where another name for a grand challenge (a moonshot) derives its name. Grand challenges are not just extremely difficult problems the world needs to solve, there are issues so large it seems that no solution is possible. That is why a unifying factor for all grand challenges is the use of science and technology as a means to help solve these enormous problems. The global aspect of the grand challenges allows for increased innovation when it comes to attempting to solve them. Normal problem solving methods won’t make the cut where grand challenges are concerned. Researchers, scientists, and other “non-traditional” solvers must come together to think beyond what they believe to be possible to find solutions that can be applied to some of the must confounding problems the world faces today.
Science and technology are not only useful in terms of solving these grand challenges; they also spur innovation, creativity and job creation along the way. Through the process of solving grand challenges, an overall community of innovation can grow, which can them be applied to a wide variety of problems, grand challenges or not. One grand challenge that is now becoming more and more necessary to solve is the search for new energy resources. Other important grand challenges are cures for cancer, developing improved ways of teaching and learning, eradicating or finding vaccines for deadly diseases and improving food security.
In terms of development, USAID has come up with nine grand challenges. They believe that science and technology can lead to exceptional breakthroughs for the world as different organizations and disciplines come together to attempt to solve the grand challenges.
Development focuses grand challenges are all in the same domain as the grand challenges listed above. They focus on food security, eradicating diseases that plague the developing world, and finding different energy resources that can be used to provide fuel for people to power their homes and businesses. Grand challenges and the people that devote their careers to solving them are especially important as they allow for increased innovation in not just their own domain but in others as well as people are able to take ideas and apply them to their own area of focus. The innovation and creativity that come out of the attempts to solve grand challenges help make the world a more diverse and compelling place.
How Net Neutrality is a Multi-stakeholder Internet Governance Issue
The internet is an international communications resource that allows the exchange of content between individuals across a network of devices. Because the internet has no centralized governing body, constituent networks are the ones that set the policies on internet usage. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai recently proposed a plan to kill the net neutrality laws in the US, and this proposal will be officially voted on December 14th. This plans intends to give ICT corporations the right to speed up, slow down, and even block access to content. This would violate free access to information and technology, charging people more for better access and forcing others onto cheaper, slower networks. This course of action has been met with serious contention by the American public who feel like their freedom of speech rights are being violated.
With issues such as net neutrality, it is essential to have a multi-stakeholder framework in place. By having government, the private sector, and civil society take part in the governance of the internet, it establishes a framework that prevents the control and abuse of internet access. In the case of net neutrality, it is a plan that is pushed by the lobbying groups of large communications providers and that is being reviewed by the government in order to become official legislation. However, civil societies are advocating against it and through petitions and protest, are fighting to upkeep the net neutrality. Fundamentally, the internet is a public good and a key component of the freedom of speech rights that are the foundation of a democratic institution. It is up to the government to uphold these values and ensure the well-being of the population. Through actions of civil society, the official vote for/against net neutrality can be swayed to counter the actions of the private sector that seek to make profits off of the control of content. The multi-stakeholder internet governance therefore creates a system of checks and balances in order to create a just and equitable system for internet provision in the US.
Making ICTs More Accessible
Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) are an ingrained part of today’s society, ranging from cell phones to computers to broadcast radios and more. It is impossible to live in the world without encountering an ICT in your daily life, especially in a developed country. This means that ICTs can become an extremely effective tool for battling obstacles for marginalized groups like persons with disabilities. For example, UNESCO claims that ICTs can be used in education for persons with disabilities by using them as tools to identify barriers, provide teacher training, identifying minimum standards and gaps in implementation, and more.
However, ICTs can also reinforce these barriers. This is especially due to the “Digital Divide”. The term “digital divide” refers to a difference in access based on economic and social systems in regards to ICTs. There have been several large scale projects on these divides. The first of these was the ITU sponsored Maitland Commission Report which discovered the missing link- the disparity in telecommunications access between developed and developing countries. The NTIA later published Falling Through the Net, showing the imbalance in internet access between urban and rural parts of the United States. Both concluded that these differences were intolerable and provided solutions to bridge the gap. These studies show the wide variety in digital divides and the heavier impact that marginalized communities feel such as where they live (like in these reports), their race, class, age, etc. The impact always falls the most on those already oppressed.
Because ICTs are a tool for both augmenting and breaking down widespread discrimination, access must be carefully observed for inconsistency. When reinforcement of gaps is found, concrete steps must be taken in order to limit impact. One such practical strategy can be found in the controversial McBride Commission Report, or Many Voices One World. This report advocates for the strengthening of national media to pursue democratization of communication, particularly in developing countries, in response to the imbalance in access to information. The WSIS and follow up WSIS+10 conferences also aimed to combat the digital divide between richer and poorer countries by increasing the multistakeholder process. Despite this work, digital divides still remain a rampant problem today, affecting many marginalized groups across the globe. The international community must continue to build on past work like these reports, shifting to a greater focus on what can be done in terms of practical solutions that bring affected groups to the forefront.
Disability Inclusive Development 
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