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The SDGs mark the clearest global acceptance yet that the previous approach to development was unsustainable. In VET, UNESCO has responded by developing a clear account of how a transformed VET must be part of a transformative approach to development. It argues that credible, comprehensive skills systems can be built that can support individuals, communities, and organisations to generate and maintain enhanced and just livelihood opportunities. However, the major current theoretical approaches to VET are not up to this challenge. In the context of Africa, we seek to address this problem through a presentation of literatures that contribute to the theorisation of this new vision. They agree that the world is not made up of atomised individuals guided by a "hidden hand". Rather, reality is heavily structured within political economies that have emerged out of contestations and compromises in specific historical and geographical spaces. Thus, labour markets and education and training systems have arisen, characterised by inequalities and exclusions. These specific forms profoundly influence individuals' and communities' views about the value of different forms of learning and working. However, they do not fully define what individuals dream, think and do. Rather, a transformed and transformative VET for Africa is possible.

EditorialDespite knowledge democracy and community-based participatory action research: Voices from the global south and excluded north still missing George Ladaah OpenjuruGulu University, Gulu, Uganda Namrata JaitliCharities Aid Foundation (CAF), India Rajesh TandonParticipatory Research in Asia (PRIA), India Budd HallUniversity of Victoria, Canada AbstractThe primary purpose for this special issue of Action Research Journal (ARJ) focusing on knowledge democracy, community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) was to draw attention to and raise debate about knowledge exclusion of and alternative forms of knowing in the global South as well as to bring to the fore the perspective of authors from the global South. We understand the global South to include the excluded epistemologies from the global North such as Indigenous Researchers from the First Nations People from Canada. Reflecting on the 12 submissions that were made for this special issue reveals how even within supportive knowledge and research paradigms that are meant to promote marginalized scholarships, the global South and excluded North still remains excluded.

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