By Nelya Rakhimova, Executive Director at RAD Platform e.V., and Joshua Cooper, Professor of Practice at University of Hawai’i, UNU-RCE Hawai’i Moananuiakea, and CEO at The GOOD Group

“You teach the youth about Christopher Columbus and you said he was a very great man… so you can’t blame the youth of today.” So goes the song by Bob Marley, written by Peter Tosh (1973). The line reflects a broader insight: the perspectives and actions of young people are shaped not in isolation, but by the systems, narratives, and institutions that frame their participation.

Since the beginning of António Guterres’s tenure in 2017, youth engagement within the UN system has undergone a visible process of institutional expansion. Launched in 2018, Youth2030 – the UN Youth Strategy – established the umbrella framework guiding the system’s collective work with and for young people. 

Building on earlier structures such as the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth that evolved the UN Youth Office in 2022, as well as the longstanding coordination role of the Major Group for Children and Youth within the 2030 Agenda processes, the UN has significantly multiplied formal entry points for young people into global policy processes. Central among these is the UN Economic and Social Council’s (ECOSOC) Youth Forum, first convened in 2012 as a half-day conference, which has since grown into a key annual platform where youth representatives engage with Member States and contribute to deliberations linked to the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) and the 2030 Agenda. 

Participation has expanded considerably, with thousands of young people now engaging alongside ministers and senior officials each year. Young people have actively used these opportunities to organize both within formal UN structures and outside the UN in order to contribute to shaping the future of the multilateral system.

Beyond ECOSOC, sector-specific agencies have developed their own formal mechanisms: YOUNGO at the UNFCCC, the Children and Youth Major Group at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Global Youth Biodiversity Network at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Youth Caucus at the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the World Food Forum Youth Assembly at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO). 

At the health nexus, the World Health Organization (WHO) Youth Council and the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) Youth Programme point to a system-wide proliferation of institutionalized entry points. 

Taken together, these developments mark a genuine shift from ad hoc inclusion toward more structured engagement, positioning youth as recognized stakeholders in global governance. At the same time, it is important to recognize that such participation builds on longer-standing traditions of engagement by other constituencies, including Indigenous Peoples, who have been actively involved in international processes for decades at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII). Indigenous youth, through mechanisms such as the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus, continue to contribute coordinated interventions that reflect diverse regional and directly impacted perspectives and are embedded within broader Indigenous movements. 

Yet the expansion of spaces has not automatically translated into a redistribution of decision-making power, and that gap deserves serious scrutiny. As a consequence, a growing number of foundations and donors have established dedicated funding streams targeting youth engagement, contributing to a rapid expansion of programs and initiatives specifically designed for young people across global policy arenas. 

Who gets to represent “youth”?

One of the central concerns in contemporary youth engagement processes is the structural bias in who is able to access and represent “youth” in global decision-making spaces. Despite their global framing, participation is often dominated by young professionals from English-speaking backgrounds or those educated within Anglophone systems, privileging specific regions and social groups. Many visible youth representatives are based in global policy hubs such as New York, where proximity to institutions like the UN enables sustained engagement. While some identify with the Global South, their trajectories frequently reflect socioeconomic and educational privilege, limiting the extent to which they represent more marginalized youth. This perpetuates existing practices of privileged nonprofits clustered around the UN headquarters and not always representing local communities.

Some governments (mainly European countries) have begun including youth delegates in official national delegations, which is a welcome development in principle. In practice, however, it creates new disparities: countries with shrinking civic space or limited institutional resources often lack comparable programmes – or select delegates whose positions align with government priorities rather than independent youth perspectives. The result is a participation landscape that can appear diverse while remaining structurally selective.

None of this is an indictment of individuals – many youth participants bring genuine commitment and expertise. The problem is systemic: access pathways are designed in ways that consistently favor the globally mobile, the highly credentialed, and those fluent in the language of multilateral institutions. When participation begins to serve career advancement as much as advocacy, the question of whose interests are actually being represented becomes harder to avoid. Age is not, on its own, a sufficient proxy for legitimacy. The UN must pursue genuine representation of We The Peoples from around the planet. 

Participation as political cover

A second problem is subtler but no less significant. High visibility youth forums have become attractive venues not only for independent young advocates but also for participants affiliated, formally or otherwise, with government structures or corporate interests. In some instances, young people are sponsored, positioned, or briefed to advance narratives aligned with state or institutional priorities, including positions that sit uncomfortably alongside agreed human rights or sustainability frameworks. This is not always deliberate manipulation; it is often the product of environments where independent civic education is limited, and young participants lack the tools to interrogate the frameworks they are invited to endorse.

The structural conditions matter here more than individual intent. First-time participants in global policy spaces frequently encounter an environment already shaped by institutional expectations, donor priorities, and diplomatic norms. Without adequate preparation and genuinely independent support structures, youth engagement risks functioning less as a critical input into policy and more as a legitimizing layer over decisions already made elsewhere. In this sense, youth actors may come to occupy positions within these processes without necessarily maintaining a direct or accountable link to the communities they are understood to represent.

A convenient substitute for civil society

Perhaps the most consequential concern is the growing tendency to use youth participation as a substitute for broader civil society engagement, particularly in contexts where independent voices are unwelcome. For example, voluntary national reviews (VNRs) or nationally determined contributions (NDCs), designed as multi-stakeholder accountability processes, increasingly feature youth engagement as the primary, sometimes only, form of external participation. This is not accidental. Youth forums are more controllable, more photogenic, and less likely to produce the kind of critical scrutiny that independent civil society organizations (CSOs) routinely generate. 

The pattern is visible enough to warrant naming directly: in some national and international contexts, youth engagement has become a reputational tool rather than a governance instrument. Participation is real, but its connection to actual policy outcomes is thin. Young people are given visibility in reports, in opening ceremonies, in official communications, while the decisions that will shape their lives are made in rooms they do not enter. The effect is to provide governments facing scrutiny over civic space with a form of engagement that looks participatory without being accountable. 

The gap between representation and responsibility

Another tension that runs through the architecture of global youth engagement is rarely discussed openly. Youth networks frequently position themselves as representatives of broader constituencies, including the most marginalized, yet the distance between those speaking in New York or Geneva and those living through conflict, detention, or structural poverty is considerable. Youth platforms tend to orient toward forward-looking policy agendas – multilateral global systems, green transitions, digital futures, or inclusive and well-being economies. The immediate protection needs of young people and children facing repression or displacement receive comparatively little attention.

A particular blind spot concerns children’s rights. Most participants in global youth forums are young adults navigating their own civic and professional trajectories without caregiving experience or sustained engagement with child protection systems. Children, who cannot self-advocate in multilateral spaces if not facilitated through specific child rights mechanisms, are nominally covered by mechanisms that are in practice oriented toward youth. Compounding this is a notable institutional wariness within youth-led spaces toward collaboration with child rights organizations – a defensiveness rooted in the legitimate but sometimes counterproductive concern that adult professionals working on children’s issues will absorb and ultimately dominate a space that youth fought to control. The result is a self-reinforcing separation: child rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) compete with all other thematic NGOs, youth advocacy networks, and children who fall between those two worlds, as they are too young to participate, too invisible to be consistently championed, and are poorly served as a result. 

As youth participation increasingly mirrors the professional norms of multilateral diplomacy – polished statements, consensus language, institutional fluency – it risks drifting away from the urgent work of defending those with the least power to speak for themselves. Children are the most acute example of that failure. Yet the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) illustrates a potential path to realizing rights through the CRC Optional Protocol Three, under which children and youth can submit complaints about violations directly to the UN.

Addressing these challenges requires moving beyond symbolic inclusion toward structural reform of how youth engagement is designed, resourced, and evaluated. The following recommendations suggest possible directions for strengthening the effectiveness and integrity of youth participation in global processes:

• Reform access pathways to prioritize structural diversity over geographic tokenism: Funders and conveners should invest in sustained support for young people from under-resourced civic environments – covering not only travel costs but language access, preparatory training, and follow-up engagement. Single conference participation without continuity produces visibility, not influence. The Global Indigenous Youth Caucus illustrates how this can be done by bringing voices from the ground to the global arena.

• Establish an independent evaluation of youth engagement outcomes: There is currently no systematic mechanism for assessing whether youth inputs actually shape policy outcomes. UN agencies and Member States should commission independent reviews – co-designed with youth organizations outside existing advocacy networks – that evaluate not just participation rates but traceable policy influence.

• Introduce conflict-of-interest transparency standards for youth delegates: Where participants are funded by state, corporate, or politically affiliated actors, that relationship should be disclosed. This is a basic transparency norm applied elsewhere in multilateral engagement, and there is no principled reason to exempt youth forums from it.

• Reconnect youth engagement with protection and rights agendas: The current architecture privileges policy advocacy over protection. In dialogue with bodies such as the Human Rights Council, the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), and UN human rights treaty bodies, particularly the CRC, dedicated spaces should be developed to ensure that young people experiencing repression, displacement, or detention are not absent from the rooms where their situations are discussed. 

• Differentiate youth and children within participation frameworks: “Youth” and “children” should not be treated as a single group. Dedicated mechanisms are needed to ensure that children’s specific rights, vulnerabilities, and perspectives are meaningfully represented, rather than subsumed under broader youth engagement processes.

• Resist the drift toward youth engagement as reputational management: The credibility of the entire architecture depends on whether institutions are willing to tolerate critical, dissenting, and inconvenient youth voices. Curated consensus is not participation – and without a genuine commitment to influence, these spaces risk becoming the legitimizing facade they were designed to disrupt. For example, CRC General Comment No. 26 (2023) on children’s rights and the environment was developed through an extensive, multi-year participatory process, engaging over 16,000 children from more than 120 countries. The process included global, regional, and local consultations, with a particular focus on the lived experiences of children most affected by environmental harm and the climate crisis.For example, the CRC General Comment 26 coordinated community and digital consultations at local, national, regional, and global levels for multiple years, informing the drafting, including a diversity of directly impacted stakeholders.