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Respecting Indigenous Knowledge

I visited for the first time Australia in spring 2023. When the Qantas plane landed in Sydney, the first announcement acknowledged the First Nations peoples of Australia as the continuing custodians and traditional owners of the land. I was amazed and inspired because we had started to plan the next WGEA Assembly around the topic of indigenous knowledge. We also adopted it later as the main topic of a collaborative course with the University of Helsinki.

Indigenous knowledge is founded on centuries of wisdom, challenging what we consider as knowledge. It is often seen as opposed to scientific knowledge, but this is too simplistic. Empirical, experience-based, and tested in everyday practices, indigenous knowledge is also scientific. Such a deep understanding of the environment is expected to become increasingly important as we must adapt to a rapidly changing climate. However, utilizing indigenous knowledge includes questions of how to approach it respectfully and fairly.

Indigenous knowledge is a tough question for public authorities. For example, a Supreme Audit Institution can listen to the holders of indigenous knowledge while making their assessments. At the same time, from the historical perspective, they are part of the oppressive system. Thus, engaging with indigenous knowledge is most of all about building trust.

The main discussions of the Rovaniemi Assembly and indigenous knowledge are available here: INTOSAI WGEA Seminar Summaries 2024. At the University course, students conducted a comparative analysis between Australia and New Zealand, as well as Canada and Finland. This was pedagogically a good exercise as it helped to see the various contexts and histories of First Nations and how they affect the situation today. Students’ report is available here:  wgea-and-university-collaborative-course-2024_indigenous-knowledge.pdf

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Long-term plans

At the heart of sustainable development is the long-term approach, the famous future generations, that the Brundtland Commission so beautifully named as one key stakeholder in 1987. The importance of longer-termism is now gaining root among the investors and company leaders, as a recent article on ESG investment in Financial Times argued. On the one hand, there is the short-term survival in the midst of pandemic. On the other hand, there is growing awareness on the links between the pandemic and long-term systemic issues that can have  short-term impacts. 

One example of such systemic issues is the root cause of whole pandemic: the unsustainable way we consume and deal with the ecosystems globally. 

Applying a longer-term view in the usual governance routines might not always be easy. We wrote about this an article with Lassi Perkinen at the National Audit Office of Finland, using the UN Agenda 2030 as an example. In the EU, the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs came in 2015 in the middle of the EU2020 strategy and in the beginning of the multi-annual financial framework 2014-2020. Perhaps understandably, the EU simply later noted that the EU2020 strategy is aligned the with the Agenda 2030 and did not initiate any new strategy process for it. But this can also be considered as a missed opportunity for the EU to seize the moment and make itself a SDG-leader. 

Sustainable Development Goals

In the case of Finland, the Agenda 2030 came into the context where sustainability strategy had been renewed couple of years earlier. The main challenge was to align the strategy with the SDGs. Quite interestingly the SDGs finally proved to be more attractive than the Finnish priorities: the latest Government Report on the Agenda 2030 is structured according to them. 

The Agenda 2030 itself is reaching to year 2030 and is therefore not inter-generational. But reaching even to 2030 can be challenging in the existing government cycles. 

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The power of clear and colourful SDG logos is enormous. The recognizable iconography has helped the SDGs to become a truly global brand.