Posted in Blog on Oct 08, 2026.
In your work on "The Zero Generation" and throughout your work in the Education 2030 Steering Committee, you challenge the technocratic and ahistorical traps of modern governance. You advocate for reimagining policy by anchoring it in critical theory, art, and philosophy - connecting ancestral foundations with intergenerational equity. In public policy, decisions frequently falter because they treat education and sustainability as standardised, technical delivery targets rather than spaces of collective meaning and human dignity.
Policies often fail not because science was faulty, but because they failed to engage human meaning, emotion, and culture. How can the arts and humanities serve as practical mechanisms for public policy - transforming abstract planetary boundaries into tangible, visceral human agency and community action? Can they serve as concrete methods to deconstruct institutional inertia and build genuine epistemic justice in public governance?
Thank you for these questions.
Firstly, I think it is interesting to compare public governance and policy, to epistemic justice. Primarily as under the social contract, the public - community action - gives power over to representative democracy to “organise our lives”.
But what we see is most national bureaucratic systems create policies that are instead inherently hermeneutical. I mean that these policies reinforce the paradox of the state itself. The policy is hermeneutical because it justifies existing public governance systems; and the public governance systems are contained in the artefact which is the policy.
This Ouroboros is our inheritance of the post-World War II exceptionality of governance in the nation state. Public policy fails when our governance systems reduce policy to the “event that HAS happened”. The organicity of policy responsiveness is depleted. Policy then says of urban planning and environmentalism, healthcare and education systems: public governance HAS occurred! No need to question it! The words are written! Yet in education for example, such is the evidence concealing that about $120 billion USD is required to address teacher shortages by 2030.
There is a theory in semiology studies by Ferdinand de Saussure. He says that the word is arbitrary as it can only point to the concrete truth. In a similar manner, public policy continues to gesture to community action: here is the institutional inertia.
When I mentioned ahistoricity in “The Zero Generation” article, I was referencing what education theorist Henry Giroux calls an “organised forgetting”. Giroux says: “Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organised forgetting”.
In today’s society, I think our institutions have often reinforced forgetting.
The concealment of genocide and colonialism; constant consumption; disenchantment with Western modernisation: have become the transactional planetary boundaries that define and exploit our relationship with Mother Earth, Father Sky, or our Sisters, the Ocean and the Stars.
These boundaries mirror that which creates inner psychological forgetting of who we are. Misinformation, data harvesting, and the rise of artificially created religious, cultural and social wars, profit off of hyper-self awareness and shame that combat true human connection. This is not an inheritance for our future generations; it remains the miseducation of intergenerational trauma.
Art and philosophy stand in direct contrast to this. They refuse to forget shame and difficulty, or to venerate it. They capture the lament, and the overcoming. I think of critical theorist, Theodor Adorno, who after lamenting “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” - a sentiment I’m sure reiterated now in other world conflicts - later returns to say poetry is essential, as it operates as the creative witness for where human agency is and is not.
I’m not advocating for the progressive style of “activity methods” my country saw with Clarence Beeby in the mid-20th century, which is often falsely posited against empiricism. We’ve just surveyed approximately 110,000 young people on the post-2030 agenda for education at UNESCO. We asked young people what they would do to support education. Their response has been tutoring, mentoring, and helping others - this is the type of community action I mean. Such action lives through our physical beings, and is often passed down between generations. This is something policy can never capture. It can only ever gesture at encounter or lineage. Art goes one step further. It does not gesture; it witnesses.
This is the embodiment of a Māori whakataukī from Tinirau of Whanganui:
“Toi tū te kupu, toi tū te mana, toi tū te whenua!” (Hold fast to the word, hold fast to the spiritual authority, hold fast to the land!)
While this proverb seeks to hold onto culture, to me it also speaks of a redemption of the gesture - of the word in governance - when it reflects the embodied, corporeal land itself: the people and the people to come. Scientific and economic data propelling policy when recontextualised to the relevant cultural, linguistic and historical periods, create trust.
This is the actuality of the UNESCO MOST-Bridges Manifesto’s “knowledge traditions are living cultures”. The arts and humanities remind us that human agency and freedom must be and must remain, unforgettable.
Throughout this discussion we have heard that responding to complex socio-ecological transformations requires us to bring together forms of knowledge that our institutions have traditionally kept apart. UNESCO itself has recently brought Natural Sciences and Social and Human Sciences together within a unified Sciences Sector, precisely with the ambition of breaking down some of these boundaries. But institutional structures, in universities, research systems and policy advisory mechanisms, still tend to reward disciplinary specialization.
What needs to change in the way universities and research institutions organize, fund and recognize knowledge so that collaboration between natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities becomes normal practice rather than the exception? And perhaps more importantly, how do we ensure that this opening also creates meaningful space for local, Indigenous and other knowledge systems in the way research informs public policy?
To make collaboration across sciences, humanities, and diverse knowledge systems standard practice, we must fundamentally change how we measure academic success, allocate funding, and define expertise. This institutional struggle mirrors state budgeting at large, which suffers from a similar structural myopia in the public services.
This challenge brings to mind an exchange from the film, Mr. Holland’s Opus. When a cost-cutting principal decides to eliminate the music and drama programs, he says: "If I’m forced to choose between Mozart and reading and writing and long division, I choose long division." To which the music teacher, Mr. Holland responds: "Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want... Sooner or later these kids are going to have nothing to read or write about."
I want to applaud UNESCO for its deliberate efforts to bring together the Natural Sciences and the Social and Human Sciences. For too long, our global society has succumbed to the "either-or" dichotomy. We have consistently prioritized the "long division" of the natural sciences—despite being heavily dictated to by national trade agendas and corporate intellectual property—while treating the social sciences as optional intellectual luxuries.
This systemic failure is two-fold. Mechanically, it is driven by the rigid appropriation methods of funding councils that enforce strict disciplinary silos, alongside the focuses of industry-owned journals. Philosophically, it is sustained by academia's own paradigms, where the pursuit of a singular "theory of everything" has actively suppressed the quantum realities of plural "knowledges".
Sometimes we literally cross campus barrier lines. For example, one of my colleagues said in the 1980s she had to go from one side of the university to the other to study cognitive psychology. I have also experienced this in my work between sociolinguistics and security. This is even more so for academics and students from the Global South to whom mobility represents nations, due to weaker academic quality. Such restriction contradicts the foundational ethos of the university, etymologically rooted in the concepts of the "whole" and the "community."
By building these rigid walls, institutions choke out vital opportunities for partnership. This erasure forces communities to fight exhaustively for the legitimacy of their own methodologies. We see this in Kaupapa Māori research in New Zealand. Indigenous systems contort to fit Western academic molds, or create new universities - a path that severely strains national funding and their dignity - rather than creating a third-culture paradigm for research development.
Breaking these cycles requires visionary structural bridges. Initiatives like the MOST-Bridges Coalition or even the UNESCO IESALC South-South University Cooperation Network - who I have partnered with - are incredibly heartening. They pull together cross-regional expertise, mobility and fostering equitable, collaborative industry partnerships. They offer a blueprint for what higher education should be: a truly shared, inclusive ecosystem where no knowledge system is treated as an optional luxury.
Ellen Dixon, Individual Specialist at UNESCO | NX Officer at UNA NZ | Board Trustee at NZCGS | PhD Candidate in Critical Theory & Psychoanalysis.
Original abridged article of this fuller text: Against an Organised Forgetting: The Arts and Humanities for Transformative Change in Public Policy - UNESCO MOST Forum 2026
