Willem Fourie¹, Joan Bastide²
¹Social Ethics, University of Pretoria, South Africa; ²OneMap Myanmar, University of Bern, Switzerland
We are envisioning a traditional session in which five presenters provide insights from distinct perspectives including academia, national government, environmental sector and civil society. Each presenter will discuss initiatives aimed at strengthening partnerships in order to promote the use of relevant evidence to ensure sustainable and inclusive development in South Africa and Myanmar.
The session includes evidences on a variety of ongoing transformative partnerships within national governments, between national governments and academia, local communities, civil society, and private sectors, including examples of broad multistakeholder dialogue platforms established to address and resolve complex trade-offs and development issues.
Thus, the five presentations provide individual thrusts in contributing to national development, yet collectively demonstrates core partnerships that ensure successful evidence-informed implementation and evaluation of development priorities expressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The session has two sets of outcomes:
- It seeks to highlight the critical role of stakeholders whose processes and activities often intersect in achieving common developmental goals. This is demonstrated through highlighting environmental sustainability interventions in South Africa and Myanmar; and
- It puts the spotlight on knowledge stewardship in domesticating the SDGs, finding innovative ways in evidence synthesis methods and facilitating knowledge to policy when governments are required to take stock of relevant evidence, understand their knowledge needs and appreciate different starting points in implementing the SDGs, including alignment with existing national development priorities and plans.