research

My discovery of systems through the words of Jane Jacobs

In 2005, I had been living for over two years, in Kampong Thom, central Cambodia. I was working on community development and local governance participation in local governance in a GTZ (now GIZ) rural development programme. I also worked on my PhD research on education decentralisation and community participation in school management, which I did […]

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Preparing the governance systems of tomorrow: researching megatrends. A conversation with Elina Kiiski-Kataja and Tony Addison at the Oodi Library in Helsinki

What does it mean for a government to invest and research megatrends? How does it help to prepare the governance system of tomorrow? To what extent are megatrends taken into consideration in international development research and programming? I have met Elina Kiiski– Kataja and Tony Addison at the Oodi Library in Helsinki to discuss these questions.

Preparing the governance systems of tomorrow: researching megatrends. A conversation with Elina Kiiski-Kataja and Tony Addison at the Oodi Library in Helsinki Read More »

Podcast – Bridging education research with policy and practice. In conversation with Prof. Elina Lehtomäki of the University of Oulu

Every year I travel a couple of times north to the city of Oulu to give a class on development theories to the master students at the Faculty of Education at the University. The master course is part of the work of the interdisciplinary research group called Education, Diversity, Globalisation and Ethics. The group examines

Podcast – Bridging education research with policy and practice. In conversation with Prof. Elina Lehtomäki of the University of Oulu Read More »

What bees have to do with the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Quite a lot, it turns out.

Bees and the genetic technology that underpins research on bees is an illuminating window on our future and the complexity, politics, and uncertainty of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has defined the 4IR as “the confluence of technological breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as

What bees have to do with the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Quite a lot, it turns out. Read More »

Reference societies and adaptive development: a conversation with Daniel Suryadarma about Indonesia’s participation in the PISA educational assessment

During a seminar organised by the EduKnow research group at the University of Tampere on comparative education, I came across the interesting concept of reference society. In a nutshell, countries which, like Finland, find themselves at the top of the PISA ranking may become models or references for countries looking for ways to improve their education policies

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