Young people care deeply about the complex challenges that political leaders around the world must address. From climate and education to equality and inclusion, they are concerned about the issues that have affected their childhoods and will continue to have an impact on their adult lives. More than anything, they want a voice in decision-making and offer fresh perspectives that leaders can use to develop policy that serves future generations.
Yet, as a United Nations (UN) report confirmed in April, young people are almost invisible in public policymaking. While more national and international decision-making bodies are working to consult young people, their involvement is generally restricted by barriers including funding, rapid turnover within youth bodies and a lack of diverse representation, often rendering it tokenistic.
There are ways to ensure that including young people in governance can be meaningful, however. The UN has set out principles to achieve this – saying youth engagement should be properly resourced, transparent and accessible – and has urged all member states to expand and strengthen youth participation in decision-making at all levels.
Generation Global, the education programme established by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change to equip young people around the world with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to become active and open-minded global citizens, welcomes these recommendations. In our work we see how caring and fearless young people are in dialogue on topics that have divided communities, cultures and countries, and how invested and proactive they are in tackling global policy challenges. Recently, when we asked our programme participants which issues concerned them the most and how they could make a difference, they highlighted a range of major challenges, such as climate change and the need for a quality education, but also said they felt largely marginalised in terms of addressing them. Young people are disillusioned, but they are not disengaged – and we believe that governing bodies at all levels must find ways to allow them to be heard.
One way to help youth inclusion extend beyond consultation into decision-making is to apply a youth-orientated future filter to policymaking. In the same way that institutionalised processes mandate that governments must evaluate the environmental implications of decisions, future filters require leaders to consider the long-term impact of their strategies on the generations coming after them. Applying a youth-orientated future filter can ensure that the views, wants and needs of young people, who make up 16 per cent of the global population, play a critical part in planning and implementation. This encourages young people to be politically and socially engaged and instils a greater sense of responsibility for future generations.
While there is no universal approach to incorporating a future filter into policymaking, countries have experimented in different ways. Canada, Finland, Malaysia and Singapore, for example, have created working groups and government bodies tasked with linking foresight work into mainstream policy processes. In Finland, a special parliamentary committee for the future has been established to identify future challenges and set out a long-term strategic agenda. In Singapore, the Centre for Strategic Futures (CSF) uses “Scenario Planning Plus”, a tool for examining likely and less likely signals and trends in order to develop adequate long-term policy responses. In Canada, the federal government has established Policy Horizons to embed foresight in policymaking. Some governments have also partnered with think-tanks tasked with analysing their countries’ policy landscape through a future-focused lens.
Consulting youth is core to establishing future-filter mechanisms, because future challenges and opportunities will become the responsibility of today’s young people. Youth inclusion and awareness of future filters is central to relieving young people of anxieties and concerns for their future, as well as addressing feelings of disenchantment or disengagement with policymaking processes. Future filters that include young people can also help mitigate the short-termism of today’s politics. While policymakers are often aware of the need for long-term thinking, they can struggle to do so in practice because their attention is limited to addressing immediate pressures. Yet concerted efforts to future-proof policies developed today could help break the cycle of urgent problem-solving for the next generations of policymakers.
Because of this, Generation Global believes that leaders working on future filters should treat youth involvement as both a principle of and best practice for long-term policymaking.
Future Filters in Action: Models from South Africa, Wales and Canada
Some initiatives aiming to include youth in future-filter work are already in place and can provide a useful blueprint for organisations and countries aiming to step up their work with youth.
In South Africa, for example, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology has experimented with so-called youth-sector-specific scenarios; during workshops organised for and led by young people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, alternative “future worlds of youth” have been created that have subsequently been used by policymakers and civil servants to test the resilience of current thinking and policymaking. In other words, the scenarios that young people have co-created, which have served as representations of their visions and concerns for the future, have been used to assess whether current policies are doing an adequate job of promoting a sustainable future.
One such scenario looks at the consequences of widespread unemployment, providing the opportunity to offer creative and varied strategies to avoid an impending crisis. The South African government has also used questionnaire-based surveys as a core element of its work. Young people have taken a leading role in designing the questions and nature of the surveys, which aim to gauge their peers’ views and aspirations regarding current and future policy issues. Through a series of consultative processes and workshops, young people and decision-makers have subsequently used these survey responses as a form of grading matrix to judge whether current policies are addressing the kinds of issues that concern future generations.
Wales has also experimented with innovative mechanisms and taken ambitious steps to involve youth. The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015) is one of the few laws in the world that directly legislates for sustainable development by enshrining into law a public body’s duty to consider the long-term implications of its decisions and to work closely with people and communities to sustainably tackle issues including climate change and poverty.
In practice, this has been achieved by implementing initiatives including “The Wales We Want” – a project that has engaged a diverse range of stakeholders and citizens in a national dialogue on current and future policy challenges. Aiming to “take the conversation where the conversation is happening”, project officers engage directly with schools and youth associations to ensure that young people’s perspectives are brought into the national debate. Group discussions have been organised in ways that have allowed young people to set the agenda for the meetings and produce the key takeaways from ensuing conversations.
Wales has also demonstrated leadership by establishing the position of a future-generations commissioner, a pioneering role mandated to embed consideration of the consequences of decisions. The role involves reviewing and monitoring the long-term impacts of decisions, highlighting challenges and opportunities for future generations, and supporting sustainable development.
These kinds of activities need not be restricted to national or international level. In addition to formalised mechanisms for canvassing the views of youth, policymakers should also consider institutionalising grassroots-developed-and-led youth movements and organisations. Providing resources to formalise movements like these makes them more accessible, so that the young people involved represent a more diverse set of perspectives. It also means that young people get the preparation they need to contribute to policymaking spaces effectively and delivers a continuity of youth representation.
At the local-government level, for example, the City of Toronto has supported the Toronto Youth Cabinet, the official youth-advisory body to the city, since its establishment in 1998. Open to people between the ages of 13 and 24, the Youth Cabinet promotes youth involvement in local government and is supported by a secretariat.The Canadian province of Ontario supports a youth-opportunities fund for grassroots organisations, with a focus on marginalised communities. With two levels of support at seed and scale stages, the fund is intentionally broad in its scope of interest – recognising and reflecting young people’s interest in a broad range of policy initiatives that impact across communities and contexts.
As today’s young people eye the challenges and opportunities that will shape their futures, important pathways to better representing their concerns in decision-making are being forged. The recent UN paper and these global examples demonstrate that youth inclusion is moving up local, national and international agendas. While it may take time to see significant benefits, policymakers are increasing their efforts to hear young people’s perspectives in ways that inform their planning. This is positive. Every day we hear inspiring, open-minded and innovative dialogues between young global peers in the Generation Global programme. It is crucial that we continue to find diverse and effective ways to represent these young voices in every context.
Read our full consultation with the Generation Global community.
Lead image: Getty