The Role of Millennials in Promoting the SDG’s

Being part of the millennial generation, we have witnessed fast-paced changes within our societies. For example, our generation is entering the workforce at a time of technological change and economic disruption, thus impacting the labor market in general. It is until this year that we witnessed how a global pandemic could cause major disruptions to many different life aspects, from health, jobs, to our well-being. During these challenging times, it is crucial to gain an understanding of our current realities, and how we can leverage resources in order to move forward amid the uncertainties. World leaders are now referring back to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) as frameworks navigating through the pandemic.

The year of 2020 has been life-changing given the pandemic, where disruptions are taking place at a much faster pace. The economic sectors that are suffering the most from the pandemic include tourism, agriculture, and creative industries, which collectively represent a large percentage of GDP for many developing countries in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Globally, the economy of the nations has been hit the hardest, including in Indonesia. This implies that major consequences on the socio-economic sectors are taking place as millions are losing jobs, and expected to rise within the next months. Most are contributing to informal sectors, including Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’s). Having this particular sector to dominate the Indonesian economy, the impact will be rather severe, as inequality gap is predicted to increase, a counterproductive impression to the prospective economic outlook in the past few years. Without a vaccine, the recovery of the economy is highly uncertain and we are still vulnerable to infections.

The pandemic has caused an inevitable crisis, in which strategic actions are needed to address multiple challenges in the effort of recovering. Emergency reinforces the importance of meeting the long-run targets of eradicating poverty, minimizing the inequality gap, and escaping the middle-income trap through inclusive growth. On one hand, this could be momentum for reforming systems through policy-making which promotes productivity growth and sustainable development. While it is also important to ensure human resource readiness. Being in the productive age group, millennials are particularly taking active roles in defining and executing these sustainable goals.

Sustainable Development Goals as a Framework of Action

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. The core of this agenda consists of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries, both developed and developing, to work together in a global partnership. This is based on the premise that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth, and at the same time tackling climate change and working to preserve oceans and forests. Through the SDGs, leaders from around the world are ensuring that “no one is left behind”. Following the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) which focused on reducing poverty in all its forms, the SDGs have a broader agenda that incorporates the economic, environmental, and social aspects of sustainable development. These goals are all interrelated, therefore required for an integrated solution. The SDGs are expected to stimulate economic growth in a number of countries by creating 380 million jobs by 2030.

This year marks the “decade of action”, defining the year for a more urgent phase of implementing the SDGs. Given the disruptions caused by the pandemic, it is important to act quickly, yet ensuring sustainability for a better post-pandemic environment and societies. In this case, ideally, countries must make progress toward all the SDGs to combat the economic, social, and political consequences of Covid-19. Women and children, migrants, and low-income groups, in both developed and developing countries, are considered as marginalized groups, and have been much more susceptible to the negative health and the economic effects of the Covid-19 crisis and would benefit greatly from progress toward the SDGs. Young people are in no exemption to the vulnerable group given the pandemic. According to Badan Pembangunan dan Perencanaan Nasional (Bappenas), unemployment in Indonesia mainly resides among low levels of education and young age, 15–19 year olds = 25.87 % and 20–24 year olds = 15.62%. The health, economic, and social consequences of Covid-19 makes the implementation of all 17 SDGs even more difficult but also increasing the importance of maintaining progress. Countries that have frameworks in place to support efforts to achieve the SDGs are likely to be more resilient to the economic shocks caused by the pandemic and have a plan in place to respond to the economic disruption.

Educating about the SDGs at all levels is becoming more important given the recent context. Raising awareness of the goals should particularly start from formal institutions in which knowledge are being produced and reproduced. Knowledge is one of the crucial factors that has capacity for innovation and social change. In the context of a fast-changing world, utilizing knowledge in the implementation of the SDG’s is a means of strengthening the framework and to work on effective implementation. In this case, being in the group of productive age, millennials are also considered as part of the main actors in the process of knowledge management and transformation for the betterment of societies.

The Role of Millennials in Knowledge Society

Knowledge is defined as a capacity for action which enforces creation and transformation in the production of societal change. In terms of the pragmatic role, knowledge also has the capacity to assist the risks of decision and action.In order for these roles to work effectively, knowledge work will always include certain features of individual creativity and imagination. Thus, individuals are actors in which knowledge is embodied, who are actively processing and implementing them. The greater the mastery towards knowledge, one becomes an expert. Demand for knowledge expertise may differ in several respects: by its purposes, ranging from understanding to predicting and constructing; its form of communication, which may be more propositional or more practically embedded; and its scope of application.

In the context of the knowledge society, it is likely that knowledge is being transformed into more tangible forms, such as marketable goods and services (i.e in organizations, industries, businesses, etc). Collective knowledge mastery is thus a dynamic process, as knowledge itself is following the dynamics of change. Part of the knowledge mastery is the ability to process information to understand, describe, predict, construct, and control changes. These processes are known to be the knowledge work of researchers, experts, analysts, and users, resulting in theories, models, scenarios, evaluation criteria, decision strategies, experimental designs, and implicit experience in order to establish bits and pieces of orientation and certainty. Orientation and certainty are needed by individual and corporate actors who face the risks of decision making in an environment that has become complex, opaque, and rapidly changing precisely because of the infinite amount of information it contains. The instantaneous availability of ever-increasing resources of information and information about information vastly increases the need to know something about its value and relevance (Earl, 1996).

The millennials generation is not an exemption to the knowledge society. To classify millennials as experts might be an overstatement, yet they are active actors in the process of knowledge mastery. Given the age range of this generation, the degree of knowledge mastery also varies, determined by several factors, such as current roles, practical experience, degree of skills possessed, etc. The term knowledge economy has become more apparent during the timelines of this generation, as part of the new economy, which also consists of other concepts such as creative economy, innovation economy, digital economy, etc. These concepts are already being introduced in the current context and predicted to be paradigms of the future. In the age of the knowledge economy, technology is considered to have a prominent role, thus information and knowledge are much more accessible for the millennials. In the mass landscape of these items available, mastery is becoming much more important. Despite the disruptions, the millennials are known for their adaptability and agility. Talents among millennials are developed both through formal and non-formal institutions. Millennials dedicating themselves to both sectors could build bridges for the sake of knowledge development. The underlying concept is that communities should benefit from the knowledge, research findings, and skills generated from formal institutions and, in turn, they could learn from the experiences of the non-formal institutions and local communities in general. There is the potential for a reciprocal relationship of knowledge exchange, within which both parties benefit economically, socially, professionally, and culturally. Moreover, part of the millennials' technology savviness is that they also adept storytellers, which has mastered the skills of creating content from various sources, and this is also a crucial part of the process of transferring knowledge.

With the upcoming trends towards the third industrial revolution and the internet of things, it is important to get our priorities straight. Disruptions will be much more inevitable, and to add more risk by lingering on unsustainable practices that lead to global disasters such as the pandemic will only slow down the effort of reaching the common goal of a peaceful, prosperous, and equal society. These external circumstances have also influenced the value system among the millennial generation. The state of our world now has created a collective awareness and interconnectedness to take action, contribute ideas and resources for a more sustainable world. In practice, the accumulation of individuals possessing varieties of knowledge in collaboration should have an impact in addressing poverty and minimizing inequality, promoting food security, providing quality education, promoting climate action, etc. Because believing that we should operate in the same system is somewhat questioned, since the course of the world is heading to new, and perhaps radical, changes.

Also published in LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/role-millennials-knowledge-society-promoting-sdgs-deena-soedikto/?trackingId=mTyj0AahRuGMVtBl9VdWMA%3D%3D