Partnerships for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

In her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood gives voice to the importance of both context and experience in making sense of thought and action: “Context is all; or is it ripeness One or the other” [1] (p. 192). Similarly, social scientists have long recognised the value of identifying contextual data in the research process. From the reflexive sociologist Alvin Gouldner [2] to the celebrated anthropologist, systems theorist, and philosopher Gregory Bateson [3,4], we are reminded that the significance of words and deeds only emerges by relating them to their contexts. As argued by Gouldner: “the meaning and consequences of a behaviour pattern will vary with the contexts in which it occurs” [2] (p. 12). Or as more evocatively articulated by Bateson: “it is the context that fixes the meaning” [4] (p. 14).