Institutional 'follow through' & accountability on implementing YPS
As governments & institutions flock to create YPS National Action Plans, they need to commit to the long haul.
Some reflections on a recent African Union high-level side event on YPS and lessons for discussions on YPS NAPs below make up most of this post (and some new publications I’ve enjoyed), but first a quick call for submissions for the YPS database.
Call for resource submissions to the YPSDB
The YPS Database will have its first formal update in the next month. Launched in November last year, the YPSDB provides a comprehensive resource library of documents relating to the YPS agenda.
I maintain and update it, but rely on the community to submit resources to ensure wide and comprehensive record of the agenda. You can submit materials at any time via this form (or email me directly if you are unsure). If you have published or released something publicly recently (or know of something older that is missing from the database!), please submit it!
Thanks in advance for your help in maintaining this resource. I hope it continues to be useful to the YPS community and interested scholars and policymakers.
Institutional ‘follow-through’ and accountability: Observations from the AU High-Level Side Event on YPS, 14 February
Last month the African Union held a high-level side event on YPS hosted by Burundi (AU ‘Champion for YPS’). Framed as a consultation for the still-not-formalised 2nd Progress Study on YPS, the event was hybrid—held in Addis and online.
I mention the event because two things really stood out to me as emblematic of where the discussions on the YPS agenda are at present. To be clear, I’ve seen these tensions elsewhere, this is not just relevant to the AU, but was neatly encapsulated in this event.
The event consisted of two panels of dignitaries (representatives of various African States, the AU, the UN, and other international orgs (IOs)), several of the African Union Youth Ambassadors for Peace (AYAPs), and others in formal positions relevant to youth policy. Across both panels participants spoke of the achievements in the YPS space. This largely revolved around the development of National Action Plans.
Africa currently has the most YPS NAPs (Nigeria, DRC, Burundi, Malawi and The Gambia; five out of the global total of seven), with a large number of other countries ‘in development’.
Despite cautions and concerns from advocates and academics (especially those who point to the lessons to be learned from the WPS agenda), NAPs have become the pre-eminent way of engaging and ‘implementing’ the YPS agenda. So this focus makes sense for an institutional fora designed to highlight achievements and to platform successes.
But here is where the conversations became really interesting, both from some of the youth leaders on the panels and then when they finally opened up to the audience (for a ‘consultation, the question time was very limited) where this institutional narrative was questioned or tempered by interventions. Two strong themes emerged across the discussions.
Firstly, pointing out a disconnect between ‘achievements’ and follow through. If NAPs have been chosen by institutions as the means of implementation then validating/ launching a YPS NAP must be “the start of the process not the end” as one participant noted. NAPs are great but they “have to be resourced to mean anything”.
While there were several examples given of strong cooperation or engagement, critical interventions included the observations that youth organisations who were at the forefront of the process were sidelined after the launch, there was no sustained funding for the core implementation or to support youth in their efforts to sensitise and localise the NAP, and that tokenistic engagement with youth leaves many youth without the skills or resources to continue to lead.
These observations lead to the second theme that was evident, that of lack of accountability and trust of institutions and governments on YPS by youth. If there is not the promised ‘follow through’ then youth question the commitments that have been made. Consistently through the life of the YPS agenda, reciprocal trust between institutions and youth has been highlighted as both a core requirement and a frequent failing in YPS policy and implementation.
While governments are obviously at the heart of these concerns, discussions at the event also highlighted the absence of follow through from international organisations supporting NAP development. Speakers noted that IOs often pulled back after the launch, when support was most needed for the difficult work of implementation.
If the AU and its member states—as well as UN and other regional bodies, national governments, and IOs—have decided to forge ahead with NAPs, for all their drawbacks and limitations, they need to commit beyond the photo op, and not only maintain but continue to build relationships of reciprocal trust with youth leaders and deliver on the promises made. Simply launching a NAP is not enough.
As someone who has been following the agenda for a decade now, this event served as a neat encapsulation of repeated tensions in ‘YPS’ policy and practice, and also pointed to the need for open spaces of dialogue on this. The second progress study is an opportunity to unpack these tensions and seek pathways forward, so that the second decade of the agenda can move beyond these issues, and offer a meaningful platform for youth leadership and collaborative partnerships to address peace and security challenges of our time.
What I’ve Been Reading
A few pieces of policy research and public engagement:
“Do National Action Plans lead to action on the YPS agenda?”, by Luisa Kern at the UNU discusses the value of NAPs for the YPS agenda, nicely echoing and parallel to the themes that emerged at the AU side event. This piece is part of the UNU’s Centre for Policy Research’s work on the thematic review of PBF funding for YPS, which I await with interest!
The Canadian Coalition on YPS has published an excellent policy brief, titled ‘No Peace Without Pride’, connecting the importance of queering peace and security with the YPS agenda. Katrina Leclerc and Alexandria Bohemier show how meaningful and inclusive peacebuilding must enable not only the participation but the leadership of LGBTIQ+ young people. It is available in both English and French.
And a fabulous collection of reflections from 12 youth researchers working with the European Democracy Hub on youth and the far right in their respective countries. A lot of discussions about youth participation in far right parties and movements speaks in generalisations, and these interventions nuance our understanding of what is happening around the world.
Then two academic pieces that are open access:
Elena Butti in Social Sciences, has a piece recently published called “Youth Are Not All the Same: On the Appropriateness and Limits of Participatory Methods in Youth Research”. Butti has been engaged in careful, reciprocal work with youth in Colombia over the past many years, and this piece asks researchers to acknowledge the diversity of youth and consider the appropriateness of participatory methods in each context.
Nadine Benedix and Ajda Hedžet have a piece in Globalizations, part of the forthcoming special issue on representations of children and youth in global governance, called “Confronting international organizations on social media? Understanding digital self-representation of liminal youth in global governance”. Benedix and Hedžet ask how youth actors contest their exclusion from international organisations via social media, arguing that such representational claims enable political subjecthood.
As always, please share exciting things you’ve come across! I am always keen to hear about new publications and opinion pieces.