Opportunities for adult learning are under pressure in far too many places in the world. This situation was made all too clear at the eighth World Assembly of the International Council for Adult Education in Malmo, Sweden this June. More than 700 adult educators from almost a hundred countries, all members of non-government associations, met to take stock of the current context and future possibilities facing the field over the next four years. They focused on four key themes--the various commitments governments have made to strengthen adult education, the need to assert the right to decent learning for decent work, the urgent need to review the implications for adult learning and education from living in a climate change society, and, since we were in the Nordic countries, an exploration of Nordic popular education and its potential application elsewhere. Monitoring the progress in achieving the commitments made by governments in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in the UNESCO Education for All targets, and those adopted at the 6th UNESCO World Conference on the Education of Adults, which was held in Belem, Brazil in December 2009, may sound a little dull. But, of course, participants did far more--highlighting the most imaginative and inspiring responses to acute need. Nevertheless, the effects of a failure to hit the targets are played out in prolonged poverty, poor health, and dramatically reduced life chances. Take adult literacy as an example. There are not far short of a billion adults who have not had the chance to learn to read and write--and two in three of them are women. Yet the World Bank-led Fast Track Initiative has put a premium on strategies to secure universal primary education at the expense of other educational investment. Of course, universal primary schooling is a proper priority, but children retain literacy and numeracy far better when their parents, and particularly their mothers, also learn. The UNESCO EFA Goals have challenging targets on the need to reduce poor literacy by 2015, but three in four countries expect to fail to meet them, and adult education is altogether missing from the MDGs. Poor literacy skills are not just limited to the least developed countries of the world, of course. Every industrial nation has a large percentage of its people who struggle with aspects of their everyday engagement with reading and writing, as American educators will recognise only too readily. Often, this is recognised in national programmes designed to provide effective second chances. Yet in far too many countries there is a yawning gap between the aspirations articulated in policy and the resources (financial and professional) needed to make a real difference. Our second theme related to work. As the moves to knowledge-rich economies intensify, there are positive rewards for individuals, communities, and nations able to learn to understand the implications of rapid technological change, to adapt to its possibilities, and to shape it. Yet for individuals and groups who lack opportunities to engage with those changes, the effect of an increasingly knowledge-rich globe is increased marginalization. …