KARACHI, Dec 3: Prince Karim Aga Khan has underscored the need for decentralisation of decision-making and multi-sector partnership so as to attain true social progress.

Prince Karim, who is also the Chancellor of the Aga Khan University, was speaking at the 19th convocation of the varsity on Saturday.

He said that there had always been a human tendency to seek a simple, all-powerful answer to the world’s problem, which was neither appropriate nor always workable, as with the passage of time this had been witnessed that meeting the problems of any one sector increasingly required an understanding of other sectors as well.

“The hard reality of life is that there is no single button we can push to set off an unstoppable wave of progress”, he added.

He said that a vast decentralisation of decision-making, which had the advantage of placing new responsibilities in the hands of local communities, was already occurring in many countries. The key to future progress will lie less in traditional top-down systems of command and control and more in a broad bottom-up spirit of coordination, he noted.

He further said that the quest for a better life, among Muslims and non-Muslims, must lead inevitably to a knowledge-based society and as such there was need to know that how the Ummah of today would relate to the knowledge-based society of tomorrow.

“That will mean embracing values of collaboration, coordination, partnership, choice and diversity, learning constantly to review and revise what we think we know”, he remarked.