
Inner Development Goals (IDG) Annual Summit in Stockholm
This week, the non-profit initiative Inner Development Goals (IDG) held its annual summit in Stockholm. The goal of IDG is to harness the power of inner development to tackle global challenges, such as those outlined by the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The IDG community has developed a framework that highlights the inner skills and mindset needed to navigate the complexity and uncertainty we face today. This framework focuses on five key areas: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting. These areas encourage us to explore new ways of thinking, expand our perspectives, and build skills that drive positive and sustainable change.
The Inner Development Goals Framework
Why Are the IDGs Important?
The IDG approach came about due to growing recognition that the progress toward achieving the SDGs by 2030 is off course, with some targets lagging significantly behind. This highlights a gap in the kinds of learning required to meet these goals. While traditional learning focuses heavily on technical or professional skills—like data analysis, business skills, project management, and environmental science—these alone are not enough. The IDGs add a deeper layer, emphasizing both personal transformation and collective action.
Growing Green Skills
Connections can be made from the underlying skills and approaches within the inner development goals (linked to personal and collective adaptation and change) to other transformative learning frames. One perspective is articulated in an academic article by Kwauk and Casey (2023) who outline a number of different paradigms for addressing the climate (and other ecological) crises. From one perspective this is viewed as a technical problem where we need to grow specific capacities to deliver ‘skills for green jobs’ (e.g. data analysis, environmental knowledge, ecosystem management, research skills, technological skills). Another perspective positions sustainable change as an individual and adaptive problem, where new knowledge in the form of a ‘green life skills’ (e.g. creativity, critical thinking, networking, empathy, a growth mindset) will empower and enable sustainable behaviours. A final view is that of ‘skills for a green transformation’ which confronts the underlying roots of the crises and the vulnerabilities and injustices that are manifest; this approach points to adaptive skills to transform unjust social and economic structures (e.g. respecting diversity, integrative thinking, coalition building, systems thinking, trans-temporal mindsets). The authors suggest that the different paradigms of ‘green skills’ should not be seen in opposition, but rather collectively bridge the gap between practical and individual capabilities and transformative structural and systemic change, that will help overcome the environmental impact of human activities, and promote strategies of intergenerational care for the human and non-human world.
The Role of Education in Sustainable Transitions
After listening to the IDG summit, I found myself reflecting on the various voices expressing, in different ways, the urgent need to rethink education. Education is often seen as a linear journey, focusing on one discipline or specialism at a point in time in a formal education context. But to tackle complex global challenges, we need greater levels of interdisciplinary learning and wider and richer opportunities for informal (and inner) development that emphasize both cultural awareness and personal growth. This approach resonates with the multi-paradigm green skills view, engaging with emerging scientific knowledge and skills, helping people develop personal agency and adaptive capacities, and navigating needed structural and systemic changes towards sustainability.
At institutions like the Open University students are working and learning in dispersed settings, which brings its own challenges and opportunities for engaging wider learning ambitions. The OU’s mission of providing an education that is truly open and where its learn and live motto resonates with life long learning, provides an interesting platform to approach transformative learning, and to include life wide and life deep learning as approaches to developing sustainable literacy. Wendy Fountain’s recent blog post (Design) ecologies for learning and practice, usefully extends the idea of a rich learning landscape across life in the form of learning ecologies, building on the work of Norman Jackson and James Banks and others.
It is without doubt that greater degrees of radical innovation are needed in our educational systems to support sustainable learning that combine the operational knowledge skills, the personal and collective agencies of change and the systemic and structural transformations to shift us in beneficial and mutually supportive directions.
Building Capacity for Sustainable Learning and Change
Presentations at the IDG summit emphasized building a global community to encourage collaboration across different knowledges and practices. The IDG network already has over 600 hubs worldwide, where people are working in their own contexts to develop new solutions and visions for local and global challenges. During the summit, discussions centred on how to build capacity for learning and development, how to create impactful communities, and how to develop tools to measure progress.
A point that resonated with me from the conversations at the summit was the need to have a strong vision—what some referred to as a “North Star.” It was proposed that rather than focusing solely on the problems we face and want to address, that we should instead begin with a clear and holistic vision of what we want to achieve. If we can work together to build these visions, while developing both the technical and personal skills and collective agency necessary for sustainable transformation, we can create a more hopeful and interconnected world—and that’s something worth engaging with, and acting for.
References
Banks, J.A., Au, K. H., Ball, A.F, Bell, P., Gordon, E.W, Gutiérrez, K.D., Heath, S B., Lee, C.D., Lee, Y., Mahiri, J., Suad Nasir, N., Valdés, G., Zhou, M. (2007) Learning in and out of school in diverse environments: Lifelong, Lifewide, Lifedeep. The LIFE Center (The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments Centre), University of Washington.
2023). A green skills framework for climate action, gender empowerment, and climate justice. Development Policy Review, 40(Suppl. 2), e12624. https://doi.org/10.1111/dpr.12624
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