Designing digital ecosystems for Sustainable Societal Transformation
Sustainable development is the quintessential “wicked problem” in which several goals are seemingly in conflict. On the one hand, ending poverty and extending healthcare and basic infrastructure suggests scaling up global resource consumption. On the other, the planetary constraints and the need to tackle climate change suggest the need to reduce resource consumption.
At the same time, several new digital technologies are emerging as promising tools to navigate this seeming goal conflict: Digital and programmable money, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). The promise of these technologies, however, has so far not been realized and the global community still struggles with sustainable societal transformation. More concretely, achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seems more unattainable at a time when technological progress should be making them more attainable.
This situation calls for a holistic approach to emerging digital technologies that explores how these could be combined in ecosystems that have been specifically designed to tackle these pressing global problems. Such an approach is multi-focal and draws on expertise and experience from hands-on work on applying digital technology to sustainable development.
This initiative aims to bring together leading international thinkers, researchers, and practitioners in the intersection of digital transformation and sustainable societal transformation to set up a joint research agenda on how to apply the digital transformation to promote sustainable development. Following a multi-disciplinary approach, researchers at Uppsala University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will carry out research in close collaboration with representatives of the private non-profit sector (Maiden Labs and Global Policy House) as well as government funding agencies focusing on sustainable development (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, GIZ). These organizations are already carrying out research on how to apply digital technology to build digital ecosystems to promote sustainable social transformation – but initial considerations suggest that there would be significant synergy if these initiatives were combined in a joint research agenda.