Global Social Progress Week 2026

October 26-30

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Session presentation:

The policy paper “Bolstering the community of inquiry” discusses an underexamined perspective concerning the potentials and risks of AI use in education: the relation of education and democracy, and the fact that education shapes not only future employees, but also future citizens. We base these reflections on a Deweyan conception of democracy as encompassing not only formal institutions, but also the informal culture and social relations of democratic citizenship. From this perspective, the interrelation between democracy and education forms an important point of attention. The impact of AI on this interrelation has not, until now, received sufficient attention. We argue that the considered use of AI in education must attend  to at least three democratic dimensions: (1) education and sociality – does AI use reinforce or undermine the social nature of learning and knowledge production, as well as the acquisition of essential social skills? (2) education and equality – can AI help disadvantaged children to catch up, or does it reinforce the gaps between those from different backgrounds? Can it foster meaningful egalitarian relations in the classroom and beyond? (3) education and citizenship – can AI help with, or does it hinder, the development of democratic attitudes and values, and the acquisition of democratic skills such as independent reasoning, deliberation and collaboration among equals? We call upon educators and policy-makers to consider the shifts in power and authority that the endorsement of AI can bring, and for a nuanced approach that brings the use of this technology in educational settings in line with democratic values and social progress. We argue for the need to create community, embrace the essential role of friction, and keep challenging the added value of AI in educational contexts.

In the webinar, the authors of the policy paper present the main arguments of this policy paper, followed by commentaries from two experts: Pak-Hang Wong, a philosopher and ethicist of technology based in the Academy of Chinese, History, Religion and Philosophy and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Ethics at Hong Kong Baptist University, and Shafika Isaacs, Chief of Section for Technology and AI in Education at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg.

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Session presentation:

This sesssion presents a preview of the new indicators of social progress produced by IPSP. More than 190 countries, over the 2005-2025 period, are covered by this analysis. The indicators take the form of a “Utopia-Dystopia Balance Sheet” with a positive side and a negative side, each representing fractions of the population living under good or bad conditions. The balance sheet includes the following domains:

• Material well-being (income, wealth, labor inclusion, social protection)
• Education (literacy, learning, education level, inclusion)
• Health (longevity, child mortality, chronic disease, financial protection)
• Quality of institutions (political participation, political rights, corruption, institutional confidence, satisfaction with public services)
• Environmental quality (air pollution, disasters, water quality)
• Social cohesion (gender representation, social connectedness)
• Security (organized violence, detention, subjective safety, forced displacement)
• Subjective well-being (life evaluation, daily experiences)

In addition to the balance sheet, a set of “red flags” pinpoint serious institutional failures at the country level.

The co-chairs of the task force which has produced these new statistics will present the results and discuss them with the audience.

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Session presentation:

This session will present a participatory project in which the French institute of statistics (INSEE) collaborated with two charities (ATD Fourth World and Secours Catholique Caritas France) to elicit the expertise of people living in poverty and improve the statistical surveys and the measurement of poverty. The project has produced concrete changes to survey questionnaires and has transformed the participants, empowering the participants who shared their experience of poverty, and showcasing the value of participatory statistics.

The session will start with a screening of the trailer to the documentary that describes the project through interviews of its participants. The session will then contain a conversation with coordinators of the project, from INSEE and ATD Fourth World, discussing how the work was organized and why it mattered to the individual participants and the partnering organizations. The goal of this session is to foster a greater use of participatory methods in the design of surveys and the measures of social facts. There is an INSEE working paper (in French) describing the project and its results.

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Session presentation:

This session will present the production of the Working Group on the Living Wage, by members of the working group. Three policy briefs have now been finalized and are being considered for peer review and publication in a new journal, the International Journal of Social Progress. The policy briefs are:

• Benefits and Impacts of Living Wages (prepared by Carlotta Balestra, Suzana Hardy and Alessandro Facchini)
• Barriers and Enablers from a Private Sector Perspective (prepared by Matteo Squire)
• Informality and the Living Wage (prepared by Martha Chen and Ravi Kanbur)

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Session presentation:

This session is part of the series of UN Economist Network global webinars in association with several leading international academic networks. The featured speaker in this session will be University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor of Economics Jayati Ghosh on the topic of global inequality, including the report of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Inequality of which she was a member. That report has inspired efforts to form an International Panel on Inequality (IPI) modelled in part on the IPCC.

The two discussants will be Paris School of Economics Professor and IPSP Founding Member Marc Fleurbaey and Marta Roig, Chief of Emerging Issues and Trends Section, UN DESA and co-lead of the World Social Report 2025. Prof. Ghosh’s opening remarks and the comments by the two discussants will be followed by an interactive discussion with the global webinar audience of UN and academic economists. This session is organized in association with the International Panel on Social Progress and its Global Social Progress Week.

Registration is required for this session.

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Session presentation:

This session takes as a premise that the main challenge for Politics is not WHO becomes the leader but WHAT are the New Narratives. Speakers will introduce Five Big Drivers of Systemic Change :

• Sergio Bitar: Visioning the Future as vital for guiding systemically sustainable policies for society-as-a-whole, translating long-term strategic thinking into pragmatic policy making.
• Olav Kjorven: A Community cannot exist without rules, norms & standards.  Humanity faces an existential risk of failing to become a community, unless principles are respected. 
• Erkki Tuomioja: Power of Narratives to Vision the Future and Create Community. Systemic risks being a galvanizing force for “visioning the future” to achieve systemic sustainability and holding humanity together as a single international community.  
• Henry Wang: Syncretism (Blending contrary narratives) vs Binaries, to clarify  the destructive power of framing public choices as binaries:  us versus them; competition versus cooperation; state versus market; and authoritarianism versus democracy.
• Richard Samans: Economics as Moral Philosophy.  The failure of economics to sufficiently prioritize social inclusion and deliver for society as a whole, due in part having been captured by neoliberalism in the late 20th century, departing from its roots in philosophy in the 19th century.  

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