Jettisoning the top-down structures?
While there was a divergence of thought around top-down institutions and the possible influence of individuals within them, there was strong agreement on the challenges facing individuals and the need for action – in whatever form.

Though vastly different in their approaches, both Jeremy and Dr Badiul conclude the failure of top-down approaches in ‘providing better lives for most citizens’ and label them maintainers of ‘the existing power dynamics, inequalities, and injustices of the status quo.’

Both foresee social movements, from the grassroots to international digital campaigns, as drivers of monumental change.

“Achieving such lives would require social movements, engaging citizens from the bottom up, not only to assert their ‘rights’ to entitlements and freedom, but also to assume responsibility to take both individual and collective action to improve their own conditions.”

 

“Movements are dynamic social structures that aggregate our voices, leverage and tap into institutional power while resisting the pressures to become institutionalized and static. Movements provide a model structure for organizing and coordinating ourselves in a way that is agile, lean, and responsive.” 

Social movements, digital campaigning and online organising has certainly transformed the ability of individuals to influence – or at least register their protest – to crimes, injustices and unethical actions around the globe. But their presence has also been criticised with the rise of ‘clicktivism’ and which one columnist in The Guardian described as “to blame for alienating a generation of would-be activists with their ineffectual campaigns that resemble marketing.”

Change from within
Though Ravi and Kirsty didn’t disagree with the power of social movements and global action, they advocated change from within existing structures, be it elected politics or the tangled web of UN institutions.

 

“Electoral politics is slow and hard and often boring, but Europe’s young people simply can’t reverse the coordinated austerity which is costing them their futures without it.”

“…the greatest test will be how youth worldwide are recognised through their voice, action and partnership in the UN systems and beyond.”

But the greatest test will really be to what extent citizens are able to influence policy making at national government and international institution level, rather than just being recognised as process stakeholders or project beneficiaries.

While we are all able to disagree on the methods to achieve local, national or global policy change, each vehicle – be it elected politics, the UN, grassroots action, NGO lobby or digital platforms – is only the means to better policy and change in the lives of people around the world. Our collective sense of social responsibility and moral outrage is no longer limited by parliamentary constituencies or national borders, but the question as to which avenue for action is most effective remains unanswered.

The role of youth
In this series of exploration, we now want to explore how young people are interacting within global governance and in which ways they are engaging in international affairs to bring about the sweeping reform and change that their campaigns, outcome documents and worldwide events are calling for. The first piece offered a snapshot at the structures in place that offer a platform for action and change. Now we need to hear how young people and youth leaders are maximising these and leveraging the change they seek.

The next article will focus specifically on youth with a panel discussion hosted by the /participation team with youth leaders, activists and organisations around the world each with differing resources, formalities and perspectives on the process of change. We’ll be asking:

• How are young people organising themselves, or being organised, within the context of global governance?
• How can youth be most effective in achieving change on global policy?
• Should young people continue going to global youth events?
• Is representation an issue for youth movements and organisations?
• What does the youth movement need to do differently to become more influential in international decision making?

Look out for the article in the coming weeks.

At the same time, we have never had so many civil society organisations, mobilised individuals and campaign movements with the skills, experience and finance needed to champion, deliver and evaluate social change.

But if so many movements and campaigning organisations exist, why are we failing to achieve the changes needed to respond to the growing number of threats humanity faces?

/participation asked five leading figures from the world of global activism, politics, NGOs and the UN for their perspective on:

Which structures really change the world?

Our high level contributors are:

• Jeremy Heimans – CEO & Co-Founder of Purpose.com & Avaaz.org
  Jeremy discusses movement building through story telling and networks.
  “Movements are dynamic social structures that aggregate our voices, leverage and tap into institutional power while resisting the pressures to become institutionalized and static.”

• Kirsty McNeil – Former advisor to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
  Kirsty argues that electoral politics drives change and that youth must engage.
  “Electoral politics is slow and hard and often boring, but Europe’s young people simply can’t reverse the coordinated austerity which is costing them their futures without it.”

• Dr. Badiul Alam Majumdar – Country Director, The Hunger Project
  Dr Badiul laments top-down failures and champions the bottom up approach.
  “The top-down approach, depending on the generosity of the rulers, even when they are elected, has not in many cases succeeded in providing better lives for most citizens.”

• Jamie Drummond – Co-Founder & Executive Director of ONE
  Jamie says that it’s traditional NGO campaigning that creates change.
  “In 10 years together we’ve helped a series of campaigns go from margins to mainstream and make change happen. Credit for these achievements doesn’t lie with celebrity rockstars, though they’ve certainly helped.”

• Ravi Kakara – Expert on Children & Youth, UN-HABITAT
  Ravi explains how the UN is changing to support young people.
  “The proposed changes at the UN mark a shift that needs to be recognised in the time to come and the greatest test will be how youth worldwide are recognised through their voice, action and partnership in the UN systems and beyond.”

We want you to join the discussion at:

• youthpolicy.org/participation
• #YPDebate
• @youthpolicy @UKYA_Live and @bycLive.

 “To create change, it is not enough for us to merely connect and share stories, we must also organize ourselves and take action”

Jeremy Heimans (@jeremyheimans) is co-founder and CEO of Purpose.com and Avaaz.org, the world’s largest online political movement with more than 15 million members.

To address this question, we need to define structures as more than physical structures made of brick and mortar or glass and steel. Structures are also more than infrastructure, organizations, or institutions. There are structures help maintain the existing power dynamics, inequalities, and injustices of the status quo, but there are also structures that give us the tools to create progressive change in the world.

Stories themselves have structures. A story structure includes a beginning-middle-end, context, conflict, and resolution, etc. But we can also think of storytelling as a structure that has the power to shape our world. The great movements of the last centuries, from abolition, to women’s suffrage, to civil rights and LGBT rights, have been about telling a story of shared humanity. We are different, but also the same, and all worthy of rights, respect, and full citizenship. We need to not only tell each other the stories of what we want to hear, but also stories that challenge us to make a difference.

To create change, it is not enough for us to merely connect and share stories, we must also organize ourselves and take action. Movements are dynamic social structures that aggregate our voices, leverage and tap into institutional power while resisting the pressures to become institutionalized and static.

Read Jeremy’s full post here.

 “No matter how afraid our leaders are of the press barons and the bond markets, there is nothing they fear more than a registered voter with a grievance”

Kirsty McNeil (@kirstyjmcneill ) spent three years inside Number 10 Downing Street as an advisor to former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and later the Director of Strategy for the Office of Gordon & Sarah Brown.

Institutions don’t change the world, incentives change the world. The policy failures which underlie Europe’s scandalous youth employment rates are less to do with the governance of the European Union and more to do with the electoral incentives set by the gulf in turn-out between younger and older voters.

Electoral politics is slow and hard and often boring, but Europe’s young people simply can’t reverse the coordinated austerity which is costing them their futures without it. No matter how afraid our leaders are of the press barons and the bond markets, there is nothing they fear more than a registered voter with a grievance. Their failures are costing you your jobs – it’s time to remind them you have the power to cost them theirs.

Read Kirsty’s full post here.

“The outmoded top-down ideas are incapable of assuring lives of dignity for most people”

Dr. Badiul Alam Majumdar is Global Vice President and Country Director of The Hunger Project in Bangladesh. The Hunger Project is a global, non-profit, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.

Achieving a life of dignity – a life where every human being enjoys basic freedoms and a respectable living – is a universal yearning. Yet such a goal has remained elusive for many societies despite repeated experiments and efforts. The top-down approach, depending on the generosity of the rulers, even when they are elected, has not in many cases succeeded in providing better lives for most citizens. Rather a donor-client relationship – where the ruling elite dispenses ‘favors’ and the ordinary citizens are their passive recipients – has emerged in many such countries.

Just as an old key is unable to open a new lock, the outmoded top-down ideas are incapable of assuring lives of dignity for most people. Achieving such lives would require social movements, engaging citizens from the bottom up, not only to assert their ‘rights’ to entitlements and freedom, but also to assume responsibility to take both individual and collective action to improve their own conditions. Given such active citizen engagement, the state’s responsibility would be to enhance its own capability to create an ‘enabling environment’ so that people can succeed in achieving lives of meaning and dignity.

Read Dr Badiul’s full post here.

 “I got on that train, took a sledge hammer to the Berlin wall, joining a massive party of positive protest”

Jamie Drummond (@DrumJamie) is co-founder and executive director of ONE. ONE is a grassroots campaign of three million people committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable diseases.

I co-founded an organisation, the ONE Campaign, whose entire purpose is to help people unite in the fight the injustice of extreme poverty – and be part of history. Just as I got to be tiny part of big change with Live Aid, the anti-apartheid campaign or the Berlin Wall-busting party, so we give our members real opportunities to bust this global injustice.

In 10 years together we’ve helped a series of campaigns go from margins to mainstream and make change happen. The successes don’t always hit the headlines, but they are real. The “publish what you pay” transparency legislation we’re pushing for in the oil and gas sector is now going global. Or take AIDS – when we started 50,000 people in need in Africa had access to life saving drugs – now it’s 6.2million. The credit for these achievements doesn’t lie with celebrity rockstars, though they’ve certainly helped. It belongs to African citizens and the millions who campaign in solidarity with them such as those who marched for Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History. In their name these African successes should be far better known and they amount to something profound.

Read Jamie’s full post here.

“The greatest test will be how youth worldwide are recognised through their voice, action and partnership in the UN systems and beyond.”

Ravi is an Expert Advisor on Children & Youth, Partners and Youth Branch, at UN-HABITAT in New York. He has held positions at UNICEF Headquarters, Save the Children Sweden and UK

The UN has long recognized that young people are a major human resource for development and key agents for social change, economic growth and technological innovation. Participation in decision-making is a key priority area of the UN agenda on youth.

Through active participation, young people are empowered to play a vital role in their own development as well as in that of their communities, helping them to learn vital life-skills, develop knowledge on human rights and citizenship and to promote positive civic action. To participate effectively, young people must be given the proper tools, such as information, education about and access to their civil rights.

The UN system is coming together to develop the UN system wide action plan on youth. There is a stronger focus on youth participation and greater recognition to youth led organizations. The proposed changes at the UN mark a shift that needs to be recognised in the time to come and the greatest test will be how youth worldwide are recognised through their voice, action and partnership in the UN systems and beyond.

Read Ravi’s full post here.

In light of the ICPD Global Youth Conference held in Bali in December 2012, one of the key issues identified was the need for genuine youth participation within development discussions, policies and projects.

As a young person who also manages a youth engagement project, here are some reflections on what youth participation means, and some guidelines to making sure youth have a voice, and are not just a tick in a box.

What is youth participation?

Youth participation means young people have a role in the structure of an organisation (or project, etc.). It can appear in many different forms, but essentially means consultation, decision-making, and representation which value the role of young people.

Youth participation ensures that programs and services are relevant, engaging, and responsive to young people’s needs. For the young person, it gives them the opportunity to have a say about what is important to them, to take control of decisions that affect their lives, to increase their skills, and to build their confidence and connections to their community. For the organisation, it means campaigns and programs are more effective in reaching young people, attracting their interest and representing their views and needs. It helps to ensure effectiveness, emphasises strengths rather than weaknesses, and can help to raise the profile of the organisation within the community. It has also been linked to national democratic, social and economic development.

Climbing the ladder of participation

Unfortunately, however, many organisations and programs do not ‘do participation’ well. Often participation policies are cursory, with the young person having little if any real voice in discussions and decision making. Hart’s Ladder of Participation can be a useful guide to assess the different levels of participation. But, what can we do to ensure that young people’s participation is indeed genuine and not tokenistic?

A critical theme that cross-cuts the idea of participation is ensuring that young people’s voices are heard, that they are taken seriously, and that young people are given real opportunities to direct each stage of a project, from planning, to implementation and through to the evaluation phase.

One Youth to represent them all

Many organisations have begun to create spaces for youth representatives. However, young people are individuals; representatives cannot represent all youth or other specific subgroups (see here for a lengthier discussion on the myths and challenges of youth participation).

Thus, it is important to ensure that the youth voice within organisations is representative of the various populations affected by the project. This can be achieved by actively seeking out marginalised and less visible youth to participate, rather than relying solely on the high achievers. It is important to facilitate young people’s participation by offering some level of compensation for their time, transportation and other expenses (often just food and a bus ticket will be sufficient!).

Youth are a heterogeneous group, and so projects ought to use multiple forms of communication to reach the widest possible audience (social media, radio, TV, local newspapers and magazines, word of mouth, etc.). It is also important to be flexible, with different levels of engagement, at different times and in different formats, to enable youths to participate in a form that suits with their time, cultural and other social commitments. Training and support should be provided to the young people engaged in the project to assist them to engage other young people, with different organisations, and with the community in general.

Adult supervision required?

Another key step is to promote positive and productive partnerships between young people and adults. Adults need to be aware not only of the purpose and role of youth participation, but also of their important role as a guide and a mentor. Though not essential (and often not practical due to budget constraints), it can often help to have a particular staff member identified as a youth engagement worker who can provide support and training to both young people and other employees. As can be seen in Hart’s Ladder, it is the partnership between young people and adults that leads to the best results. Adults need to adapt to youth participation processes at least as much as young people do. Therefore, it is important to recognise the importance of ongoing training and development for adults as well as young people.

Negative perceptions of youth, age separation, and negative or overly romantic stereotypes hinder youth participation within organisations (see this article about different pathways to inclusive participation for youth). It is imperative to improve the image of youth, both amongst themselves, within the community, and within society in general. Public celebrations of successes, ongoing communication with the community through media and events, and focusing on young people’s strengths are key activities to improve the perception of young people.

Finally, the spaces, structures and institutions in which youth participation occurs must be youth-friendly, actively supporting the unique talents and strengths of young people. Structural barriers often hinder youth participation; facilitative structures, protocols and policies at all levels of the organisation will help to ensure young people have a genuine voice.

Increased recognition of the skills and talents of young people, and improved ways to incorporate their perspectives and ideas into organisations and program will greatly improve results at an individual, community, national and international level. Youth participation is increasingly recognised as a vital part of any organisation, and particularly those working with marginalised or disadvantaged groups. Young people know best their own needs, and are in the best position to know what solutions will be effective. Our role is to provide the environment for them to have an active say in the decisions that affect them.

This article is cross posted from Why Dev with permission from the author. The article can be viewed here.

To address this question, we need to define structures as more than physical structures made of brick and mortar or glass and steel. Structures are also more than infrastructure, organizations, or institutions. Structures are the ideas, concepts, and strategies that form our communities and societies. There are structures help maintain the existing power dynamics, inequalities, and injustices of the status quo, but there are also structures that give us the tools to create progressive change in the world.

I would like to talk briefly about three “structures” that I believe can help change the world and that are central to my life’s work: storytelling, networks, and movements.

Storytelling
Stories themselves have structures. A story structure includes a beginning-middle-end, context, conflict, and resolution, etc. But we can also think of storytelling as a structure that has the power to shape our world. Stories are more than products or artifacts of our society, they provide the structures for understanding our shared identities of who we are, and offer us a vision for where we are going. Stories help us make sense of the past and to shape the future. Religions, movements, and entire societies are founded upon and shaped by stories.

Stories have power. We fight wars based on (mis)interpretations of religious or cultural stories. The success of Barack Obama around the rallying cry “Yes We Can,” was about more than a campaign slogan. Obama’s story, from his multicultural background, to his determination to succeed and rise to the highest public office in the United States, reminded people that change is possible and inspired them to get out and vote to make it happen.

The great movements of the last centuries, from abolition, to women’s suffrage, to civil rights and LGBT rights, have been about telling a story of shared humanity. We are different, but also the same, and all worthy of rights, respect, and full citizenship.

We need to not only tell each other the stories of what we want to hear, but also stories that challenge us to make a difference.

Networks
Networked online and mobile communications technologies have enabled changemakers to reach out and engage new audiences. Networks have changed the way we share stories and coordinate collective action. Networks also provide us with a new model and metaphor for organizing ourselves, from top-down hierarchies to flat lattices of interconnection and collaboration.

But networks are more than online social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Our offline clubs, associations, neighborhoods and cities are the original social networks. These networks have brought humans together for mutual shelter, support, and trade. They enable us to cooperate and thrive. As communications networks proliferate and become increasingly complex, diverse, and diffuse, we must take care to counter our natural propensity to cluster with those most like us and ignore those who may seem different. We must avoid living in networked “echo chambers” where we preach to the choir and sequester ourselves in what Eli Pariser calls the “filter bubble” of the internet.

Networks are powerful tools, but they are not ends in themselves. We must use our networks to create real world impact.

Movements
Movements are communities of collective action united by a common commitment. They are networks with a purpose. To create change, it is not enough for us to merely connect and share stories, we must also organize ourselves and take action. Movements are dynamic social structures that aggregate our voices, leverage and tap into institutional power while resisting the pressures to become institutionalized and static. Movements provide a model structure for organizing and coordinating ourselves in a way that is agile, lean, and responsive.

Movements that I have been involved in founding, such as GetUp, Avaaz, and All Out, depend on people telling each other compelling stories of shared struggle and support. They depend on free and open networks that allow people to participate without fear of persecution or reprisals. Movements help create and cement new identities and new forms of citizen and consumer power. They provide a structure that allow us to come together and advocate for new and better public and corporate policies, and also to tell stories that can shape our culture and reframe our understanding of the possible.

Structures surround us. Some are visible, some are not. Structures shape us, our identities and our institutions, so we must be observant and vigilant in understanding structures, questioning them, and “hacking” them to create the kind of change we want in the world.

Back to the full article.

Just as an old key is unable to open a new lock, the outmoded top-down ideas are incapable of assuring lives of dignity for most people. Achieving such lives would require social movements, engaging citizens from the bottom up, not only to assert their ‘rights’ to entitlements and freedom, but also to assume responsibility to take both individual and collective action to improve their own conditions. Given such active citizen engagement, the state’s responsibility would be to enhance its own capability to create an ‘enabling environment’ so that people can succeed in achieving lives of meaning and dignity.

Back to the full article.

Dr. Badiul Alam Majumdar is Global Vice President and Country Director of The Hunger Project in Bangladesh. The Hunger Project is a global, non-profit, strategic organisation committed to the sustainable end of world hunger and currently works in 11 countries in Africa, South Asia and Latin America to develop effective, bottom-up strategies to end hunger and poverty.

The United States, by contrast, shows what can happen to the policy process when young people access the political one. It isn’t an accident that student finance was a 2012 electoral battleground: Rock the Vote have calculated that 80 electoral college votes were determined by the 12,000 Millennials turning 18 each day. In his post-defeat call with campaign donors, Mitt Romney put his loss down to the “gifts” the President had bestowed on growing demographics, totally misunderstanding that reaping an electoral dividend from changing the lives of millions of people is exactly how this democracy gig is supposed to work.

Electoral politics is slow and hard and often boring, but Europe’s young people simply can’t reverse the coordinated austerity which is costing them their futures without it. No matter how afraid our leaders are of the press barons and the bond markets, there is nothing they fear more than a registered voter with a grievance. Their failures are costing you your jobs – it’s time to remind them you have the power to cost them theirs.

Back to the full article.

Kirsty McNeil (@kirstyjmcneill) is a consultant advising progressive organisations on strategy, advocacy and organisational development. She was previously Head of External Affairs in Downing Street and was on the board of Make Poverty History. She blogs at Global Dashboard.

Participation is a fundamental right. It is one of the guiding principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that has been reiterated in many other Conventions and Declarations. Through active participation, young people are empowered to play a vital role in their own development as well as in that of their communities, helping them to learn vital life-skills, develop knowledge on human rights and citizenship and to promote positive civic action. To participate effectively, young people must be given the proper tools, such as information, education about and access to their civil rights.

The UN has long recognized that young people are a major human resource for development and key agents for social change, economic growth and technological innovation. Participation in decision-making is a key priority area of the UN agenda on youth.

“…The United Nations is doing a considerable amount to invest in youth. We are acquiring knowledge and best practices about the issues affecting young people today. And we are making greater efforts to engage youth in our negotiating and decision-making processes. Still, I do not think we have gone nearly far enough…” – Secretary-General’s Remarks to General Assembly High-Level Meeting on Youth, 2011

In addition The Secretary-General’s Five-Year Action Agenda in his 2nd Term priorities have clearly made commitment to boost Youth agenda in the UN system. He stated,

“…Address the needs of the largest generation of young people the world has ever known by deepening the youth focus of existing programmes on employment, entrepreneurship, political inclusion, citizenship and protection of rights, and education, including on reproductive health. To help advance this agenda, the UN system will develop and implement an action plan, create a youth volunteer programme under the umbrella of the UN Volunteers and appoint a new Special Adviser for Youth”

The UN system is coming together to develop the UN system wide action plan on youth. This process saw engagement of young people by bringing their voices on an online platform that got over 16,000 replies. There is a stronger focus on youth participation and greater recognition to youth led organizations. The proposed changes at the UN mark a shift that needs to be recognised in the time to come and the greatest test will be how youth worldwide are recognised through their voice, action and partnership in the UN systems and beyond.

Back to the full article.

Ravi is an Expert Advisor on Children & Youth, Partners and Youth Branch, at UN-HABITAT in New York. He has held positions at UNICEF Headquarters, Save the Children Sweden and UK and various other advisory and consultant positions at civil society organisations globally. He has been a global advocate on the human rights based approach to development and an advocate for social development, social inclusion and social justice.

I am lucky enough to relive that incredible feeling every day, because I co-founded an organisation, the ONE Campaign, whose entire purpose is to help people unite in the fight the injustice of extreme poverty – and be part of history. Just as I got to be tiny part of big change with Live Aid, the anti-apartheid campaign or the Berlin Wall-busting party, so we give our members real opportunities to bust this global injustice.

In 10 years together we’ve helped a series of campaigns go from margins to mainstream and make change happen. The successes don’t always hit the headlines, but they are real. The “publish what you pay” transparency legislation we’re pushing for in the oil and gas sector is now going global. Or take AIDS – when we started 50,000 people in need in Africa had access to life saving drugs – now it’s 6.2million. Or malaria – deaths down by a third in sub-Saharan Africa in a decade. Or child-killing diseases – altogether we’ve campaigned for vaccines which have helped save over 5million lives this last decade. Or Drop the Debt – removal of the debt overhang has helped African leaders put 50m more kids into school and contributed partly to many nations faster economic growth since 2000.

The credit for these achievements doesn’t lie with celebrity rockstars, though they’ve certainly helped. It belongs to African citizens and the millions who campaign in solidarity with them such as those who marched for Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History. In their name these African successes should be far better known and they amount to something profound. The Millennium Development Goal set in 2000 of halving extreme poverty has already been achieved before 2015, the target date. And since Mandela spoke poverty reduction in Africa has also picked up with many African nations driving down poverty reduction rapidly. Globally poverty reduction is now on course to near ZERO by 2030. So we could really be that generation Mandela asked us to be.

Back to the full article.

Jamie Drummond (@DrumJamie) is co-founder and executive director of ONE. ONE is a grassroots campaign of three million people committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable diseases, particularly in Africa, by raising public awareness and pressuring political leaders to support smart and effective policies. Jamie was formerly global strategist for Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt and, before that, worked at Christian Aid.

In critiquing and assessing the impact of events and processes, youthpolicy.org has sought to provoke action, dialogue and honest reflection to ensure the inertia of global governance ends and a new approach to international decision making reflects the modern world and not the post-World War II world in which many institutions were founded.

At youthpolicy.org/participation, we must move this conversation forward.

In the coming weeks we will launch a new global conversation.

What structures really change the world?

Featuring:

• Jeremy Heimans – CEO & Co-Founder of Purpose.com & Avaaz.org
  “The great movements of the last centuries, from abolition, to women’s suffrage, to civil rights and LGBT rights, have been about telling a story of shared humanity.”

• Kirsty McNeil – Former advisor to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
  “Electoral politics is slow and hard and often boring, but Europe’s young people simply can’t reverse the coordinated austerity which is costing them their futures without it.”

• Dr. Badiul Alam Majumdar – Country Director, The Hunger Project
  “The top-down approach, depending on the generosity of the rulers, even when they are elected, has not in many cases succeeded in providing better lives for most citizens.”

• Jamie Drummond – Co-Founder & Executive Director of ONE
  “In 10 years together we’ve helped a series of campaigns go from margins to mainstream and make change happen. Credit for these achievements doesn’t lie with celebrity rockstars, though they’ve certainly helped.”

This broad, all-encompassing conversation, will be the first in a series of articles to spark discussion and debate to move beyond the rhetoric of international youth participation and shift the rules of engagement for global activism and change.

Our next conversation will focus specifically on youth and how young people, in a modern, connected and networked world, can be most effective in achieving the global change they desire.

Where are the opportunities for intervention? Who can initiate and sustain change? How could this be achieved? What would it mean for the way campaigns and movements organise themselves?

Let’s begin the new conversation.

In critiquing and assessing the impact of events and processes, youthpolicy.org has sought to provoke action, dialogue and honest reflection to ensure the inertia of global governance ends and a new approach to international decision making reflects the modern world and not the post-World War II world in which many institutions were founded.

At youthpolicy.org/participation, we must move this conversation forward.

Whether it is the inertia of international institutions, outdated civil society organisations, disillusioned youth or weak political will, the failure to agree solutions to problems echoes through conference centres around the world.

Global governance breakdown
Global governance, with its outmoded systems and archaic processes for multilateral decision making, is now woefully unable to take decisions on global issues, civil conflicts, economic endurance or sustainable development.

“A crisis that’s severe enough will help to overcome social and political inertia.

– The key question is then: is the global governance crisis severe enough for civil society to successfully redefine it?”

The inability to act only weakens people’s trust and belief in global institutions. Formalised, bureaucratic institutions are disconnected from people’s lives and it is through the mass mobilisation of citizens around the world that we now see radical change achieved and celebrated.

Youth participation
Though youth participation in international decision making is, from the start, flawed by the system, it cannot excuse our on-going ineffectiveness and failure to bring about the policy change we lobby for and ‘demand’ from our leaders.

“We need to stop our amateurish approach to young people’s voice and influence in global decision-making and get real about why we’re there, what we want to achieve and how we’re going to get it.”

A resource for better governance
/participation will act as a resource and knowledge hub for national and international youth participation and will:

• Archive outcome documents;
• Create a hub of participation resources;
• Map the international opportunities through spaces & places, structures and issues;
• Map the national participation of young people in countries throughout the world.

Young people can, and should, play an important role at internationally. But the ‘global governance breakdown’ is offering little hope that our current international institutions are capable of delivering the policy and political change required. If we’re to change the system, we must change our approach. Flying around the world to the next ‘youth summit’ is pointless unless we’re clear what we want and how we will get it.