Actor Atlas

This page is supportive to article #aaaa88 - Domestic enabling environments and sound policies; UNCTAD of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda - #a4a2030 - #pi9.

There is a link to this page at a comment to http://www.worldwewant2015.org/node/296253 :

Ten years ago we edited a book Knowledge and skill chains in engineering and manufacturing. It highlights challenges and opportunities.
The keynote paper by Prof. Fumihiko Kimura is of particular interest: the continual investment in vocational skills training and human capital will be supported by a growing (engineering) knowledge base (Figure 3).

Currently we do not handle well the critical issues for knowledge management Prof. Kimura lists (page 15):
- early and lossless capturing of knowledge,
- flexible knowledge sharing,
- transparency for knowledge evolution,
- re-usability of knowledge

For what concerns the infrastructural and systematized layers of knowledge, the envisioned trend from product possession to function usage (Figure 1) could be supported by an engineering (& learning) infrastructure, which is:
- globally provided & structured alongside the ISIC classes (as stable & recurrent areas of economic activity, listed here) (ref. depicted for health care on page 13 of Global Health Enterprise Architecture and the Pathway to Health Outcomes from Science Data,
- locally delivered (ref. health care, as on page 12 of the same presentation).

At the global online consultation some answers refer to this page:

• How do we ensure that all people, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized, have the food, water, energy, health care and education they need?
• What have we learned from existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and what should be added/updated/modified, or is a different approach needed?
  • Answer: While MDG (and its approach) have several qualities I will here focus on one particular weakness: leaving out most of the required outcomes and stakeholders. The currently most debated approach with pillars social, economic and environmental and some extra goals risks to entrench that weakness (and hence achieve only a fraction of what could be achieved with a more ambitious all-involving approach).
  • My recommendation is to refer to social, economic and environmental as strata and call pillars the 10 divisions of the Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG - 01 General Public Services..to 10 Social Protection) and the 21 Sections of the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC - A - Agriculture, forestry and fishing ..to.. U - Activities of extraterritorial organizations and bodies). In the strata x pillar matrix, MDGs had selected a very small number of cells, creating on the one hand a bias to results in those cells, and leaving those working in other cells with the impression that continuing business-as-usual is acceptable. The managerial/overhead costs arguments for leaving out most cells is now specious: we can put the internet and social media to better uses.
  • The UN must re-architect the approach with the ambition to engage all sectors and administrations. The UN itself should focus on systemic maturity and capability, maturity ladders per cell & cross-cell maturity dependencies, peer-learning mechanisms and under-served languages. Other stakeholders should focus intra-sector (ISIC/COFOG cell, sector in which they work) & locally at step-by-step achieving feasible improvement targets (ref. maturity ladders, empowerment, autonomy). The equivalents of current MDG re-appear as funding priorities for collective/public/ODA resources, but all stakeholders have goals, incl. those to be reached by private, corporate and sector funding. More details and social media options demonstration at Actor Atlas.
  • For a weakness of the classifications, and how to cope with it see: Fine-tuning classification systems to products and economic activities of the south (LinkedIn, Group Open Development Technology Alliance)
• What policies and practices best promote equitable empowerment of the poor and marginalized to ensure an adequate standard of living?: http://www.worldwewant2015.org/node/281266#comment-36051
• How can employment be meaningfully approached?

The implied answer to question 3) How to develop universally applicable goals that at the same time take into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development? then becomes (this answer is published in the Forum):

Based on my experience and reading, I would suggest that some universally applicable goals must be related to change methodology, societal architecture, and personal development, in addition to those related to a sector of industry (ref. ISIC) or a function of government (COFOG).

Why? A goal such as the global reduction of green-house gas emissions is collectively meaningful, but giving collective action problems, it is not individually actionable for a large majority. Still it are billions of individual actions that should eventually produce the success.
One universally applicable goal therefore is the low-cost overcoming of goal-to-action-translation gaps in all sectors and administrations, for all members of society. Subgoals are: (i) shared use of a societal architecture approach (ref. what enterprises do when they use TOGAF); (ii) standardized monitoring & evaluation approach, including the use of collective decision frames; (iii) shared use of global skills framework.

On societal architecture, see my post on COFOG/ISIC and definitions of macro, meso, micro and pico at Social Architecture
On the need for standardized monitoring & evaluation, see http://edoc.vifapol.de/opus/volltexte/2011/3090/ (by Faust and Messner)
On collective decision frame, see wikiworx.Interaction Dictionary:regulative cycle and wikiworx.Entity Dictionary:collective decision frame
On skills framework, see: wikiworx.atria.us:Civic Participation skills.

Ref. the discussion on Sustainable Development Goals at Conceptualizing a Set of Sustainable Development Goals - A Special Event of the Second Committee of the UN General Assembly (October 16, 2012), the below comment questions the overal set-up of the global development framework¹.

One should question the society-wide architectural perceptions underlying discussions about goals that are not sufficiently comprehensive and leave out most of the required outcomes and stakeholders.

Regarding pillars, my recommendation is to base these on the 10 divisions of the Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG - 01 General Public Services..to 10 Social Protection) and the 21 Sections of the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC - A - Agriculture, forestry and fishing ..to.. U - Activities of extraterritorial organizations and bodies).

As for social, economic and environmental - the current so-called pillars - these had better be called strata - as they are indeed horizontal layers. Each pillar — typically an ISIC section with (part or whole of) a COFOG division — has a cross-section with each of them: it uses (abuses) natural resources (eco-footprint), it involves economic activities (division of labour, exchanges,..), and it means a livelihood for a number of people in all countries of the world (social footprint).

In the strata x pillar matrix, MDGs had selected a very small number of cells, creating on the one hand a bias to results in those cells, and leaving those working in other cells with the impression that continuing business-as-usual is acceptable. Pragmatism, root-cause logic, and expectations of virtuous cycle effects justify the MDG choices, yet today we should be concerned about oases-in-the-desert situations if we continue in the same way. Moreover, we have learned to put the internet to better uses. Hence managerial/overhead costs arguments for leaving out most cells cannot be sustained any longer.

The UN must re-architect the approach with the ambition to engage all sectors and administrations. The UN itself should focus on systemic maturity and capability, maturity ladders per cell & cross-cell maturity dependencies, peer-learning mechanisms and under-served languages. Other stakeholders should focus intra-ISIC/COFOG cell (sector) & locally at step-by-step achieving feasible improvement targets (ref. maturity ladders, empowerment).

More on the strata (and their orders): wikiworx: Ens Dictionary (overview)
More on the pillars, COFOG and ISIC: on Government Functions and this page.
One example role: teacher

How to bring in the common but differentiated responsibilities dictum?
Persons have a resource-base (their wealth) and a skill-level (see wikiworx:atria.us:skills and EFA 2012 Report Youth and Skills: Putting education to work (UNESCO)) and countries, sectors and companies have a maturity/capability level (ref. CMMI). These determine classes of goals/responsibilities and performances that are attainable for the actors within their livelihoods/arenas for the various territory x sector x function cells (note that there are cross-cell dependencies). The ubiquitous recurring pattern in ''public-private'' co-development is a regulative cycle including a diagnostics-therapeutics chain and best-practice sharing (matching pathologies with remedies that worked elsewhere in comparable situations).

Further references and infographics: Pinterest: Sustainable Development ContentSmart.