Financial sustainability, i.e. the ability to operate on a long-term basis without threat of stopping work due to lack of financial means, is a critical challenge for all civil society organisations, particularly those engaged in peacebuilding activities which donors might view as ‘too political’ or risky. When organisations struggle to maintain the resources needed to carry out their missions, this reduces the ability of peacebuilding organisations to plan for the long term, develop autonomy, and react quickly to design and implement activities in volatile contexts.

This issue is particularly salient for organisations which rely on youth volunteers, or for youth-led peacebuilding organisations who face funding challenges. In the recent global study for UN Security Council Resolution 2250, an in-depth study of on-ground youth-led peacebuilding organisations revealed that half of the organisations participating operate on less than USD 5,000 per year, and most youth organisations tend to operate on limited-to-no funding, with an average of 97% of staff working as volunteers (UNOY, 2017). However, community members and key stakeholders view these organisations as key providers of the most effective and responsive peacebuilding work (UNOY, 2017; Peace Direct, 2018). Despite this, they face a myriad of funding challenges.

“We must not only work for youth — we must work with youth.  All of us will gain by doing so.” 

                 – Jan Eliasson, Former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations

The work of youth in peacebuilding promises the potential of a tremendous peace and security dividend for governments and international actors. However, many young people are frustrated by the tendency of these actors treating them as a problem to be solved, instead of as partners for peace. Moreover, youth are largely isolated from non-family adults – spatially, socially, and psychologically. As a result, many non-youth peacebuilding organisations rarely interact with young peacebuilders.

Youth who live in countries where violent conflict has taken place have the capacity to engage in conflict transformation and peacebuilding efforts. They can be an important asset when it comes to shaping and engaging in peace dialogues and processes, often acting as advocates for new perspectives and innovative ideas. The constructive role that young people can play, however, is often overlooked by communities and decision makers, who fail to perceive them as legitimate stakeholders.

Part of the problem here is that non-youth actors play into the mantra of youth being “the leaders of tomorrow”, expecting youth to defer to the older generations and wait for their turn to assume leadership roles. However, the development of these ‘future’ youth leaders in peacebuilding is contingent on adult leaders’ recognition and appreciation of the knowledge, potential, and capacity youth have today as agents of social change.

Global unemployment is on the rise with a third of the world’s active youth population, about 71 million youth, either unemployed or living in ‘working poverty’. Several factors including market conditions have made it difficult for young people to secure jobs, and the current global rate of youth unemployment stands at 13% (ILO, 2018) – three times that of the adult employment rate.

Young people around the world often have little say in how economic policies are shaped and implemented. Feelings of exclusion, disempowerment, disillusionment and lacking confidence are commonly held among youth towards economic systems, who feel their prospects of financial security are lowered.

Whenever a country is faced with major political and social change, young men and women often take an active lead, mobilising their constituencies, organising peaceful demonstrations, engaging in dialogues - exhibiting a shared desire to take part in decision-making processes that affect their lives. Indeed, youth-led initiatives are growing around the world, as evidenced by the Arab spring, the Occupy protests and online social movements across the world.

However, young people have traditionally been excluded from or had a limited input or representation in formal political and peacebuilding processes. Only 1.9% of the world’s elected representatives are under 30 years old, and 80% of parliaments around the world have no members under 30 (IPU, 2016). This is often due to set age restrictions, but also underestimating youth’s potential to contribute to peace and stability through political processes (Cardozo et. al, 2015).

Inclusive peace is the idea that all stakeholders in a society should have a role in defining and shaping peace, meaning that women, young people, minority and marginalised communities are included in peace processes. Still, it is not enough to just have a seat at the table. Inclusion must be meaningful and must ensure that multiple youth identities are recognised and acknowledged, and that youth groups themselves have the strategies and practices to encourage meaningful inclusion.

Nevertheless, too often “youth” is overly simplified to a homogeneous category, one that suppresses or ignores the highly diverse needs, backgrounds and identities of certain groups of young people. Instead, a number of youth constituencies exist, and they represent the value of young people’s diversity, in terms of gender, religion, caste, education, class, locality, ethnicity, etc. Failing to consider young people in their diversity also fails to take into account their diverse experiences of conflict differ and varying motivations and capacities to work for peace.

Youth as a conceptual category are often perceived in negative ways – either as the main perpetrators of political violence, social unrest and violent extremism, or as passive victims of conflict who lack agency and need protection. In fact, the dominant narratives have tended to focus on youth as “problematic” or on “at risk” instead of considering how young people are positively contributing to peace in their societies (Mazzacurati, 2017).

These overly simplistic narratives that demonise or patronise youth have spread into policy circles, skewing policy and programmatic priorities in the process (Simpson, 2019) and contributing to counter-productive policy practices based on:

The role of youth in peacebuilding processes has increasingly been recognised as essential to positively transforming conflicts and building the foundations of peaceful and democratic societies. However, much of this discourse focuses on generalisations and often fails to highlight the evidence behind these assertions. As a result, key decision makers tend to have a limited understanding of what youth-led peacebuilding looks like in practice.

The reality is that the evidence base on what works in youth peacebuilding strategies and programmes remains limited. As such, identifying and measuring what initiatives have positive impact on the lives of young people and their communities is vital to scaling up effective support to youth around the world.

Over the course of 30 years of global expansion, participatory budgeting (PB) has been widely lauded as an effective process to strengthen democracy—one that can improve service delivery while increasing trust, engagement, transparency, and accountability between citizens and governments.

Yet behind this reputation is a range of real-world results. Just as PB is implemented in diverse contexts, at different levels of government, with different levels of resourcing, and for different objectives, the outcomes of PB processes also vary widely. Too many well-intentioned leaders and implementers end up with processes that suffer low participation and that fall short of intended goals. Often, these are due to common challenges and barriers; recent research has shown, for example, that nascent PB efforts often suffer from a “local expertise gap,” meaning that knowledge about PB is concentrated within a relatively small network of international PB experts. There is an opportunity to overcome these shared barriers by developing and sharing new mechanisms of support for PB implementers.

What kind of a public policy will advance and even incentivize a sustainable lifestyle? What are the barriers to achieving such a policy? These were the key questions of the session organized by the Science and Technology Major Group and Future Earth.

The session recognized that decoupling economic growth from resource use is not enough for achieving sustainability as long as absolute resource use will not decrease. Furthermore, a systemic change enabling the reduction of consumption can most effectively be achieved through a bottom up participatory approach, driven by action, new narratives, and changes in social norms.