What we're reading at RSA Global

Have a look at the selection of articles the RSA Global Team have been reading over the past month! They include the growing importance of cities to foreign policy, recent reports on the state of the global labour market and inclusive growth in US cities.

Education

Can we learn to live together? This is the central question of the new issue of UNESCO’s Courier – Can Education change lives? Is it possible to train for global citizenship? For more please visit this link.

In this Project Syndicate article, Koichi Hamada, a special adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, criticizes rote learning which is popular in Japan and Korea and comments on the skills needed for the digital age.

Teaching for Global Competence in a rapidly changing world is a practical guide developed by the OECD for teachers and educators which outlines the PISA framework for global competence. It provides teachers with the tools needed to embed global competence in their existing curriculum and instruction.

Economy

The International Labour Organization recently released its flagship report World Employment and Social Outlook 2018 which examines the current state of the global labour market and assesses the most recent developments and global and regional projections of unemployment, vulnerable employment and working poverty.

According to Prof. Mariana Mazzucato, “missions are both a means for setting economic growth in the direction of where we want to be as a society and a vehicle we can use to get there.” She recently authored a European Commission report entitled Mission Oriented Research and Innovation in the European Union, a problem solving approach to fuel innovation led growth.

The report is an engaging publication which outlines the strategic direction for future EU Programmes for Research and Innovation.

These two Stanford Social Innovation Review articles examine how to bring about change in today’s political climate. The first article advocates using human centred design to advance civic engagement amongst US based non-profit organizations whilst the second article focusses on four strategies for large systems change using illustrative examples and assessing their strengths and weakness.

Public Services

The recently published Brookings Metro Monitor 2018 measures US communities’ progress based on inclusive economic growth and prosperity. The communities are then ranked based on the composite inclusive growth index.  For more on this, please visit this link.

At a recent Chatham House event, a panel of experts discussed the increasing role of global cities in foreign policy and the capacity for the current international architecture to accommodate the influence of these non-state actors. The panellists include:

• Ivo H. Daalder, President, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs
• Michele Acuto, Professor of Global Urban Politics, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne
• Dr Beyza Unal, Research Fellow, International Security, Chatham House

For more on the event, please visit this link.

This Project Syndicate article addresses the need for affordable housing in global urban centres. At the recently concluded 9^th World Urban Forum  held in Malaysia, affordable housing, urban renewal and local economic development were also widely discussed. For more on the Forum, please visit this link and for more on the specific topics mentioned above, read the bulletin found here.