What Progress? What Counts? What's Next?
Reflections on the 3rd Secretary General's report on Youth, Peace and Security
The UN Secretary General’s third report on YPS was published on the 1st of March this year, fulfilling the requirement for biennial reporting on the agenda, requested by the second UNSC Resolution 2419 (2018).
As I have done previously, this post reflects on some key dimensions of the report, highlighting some successes as well as some cautions and missed opportunities. I make these observations with my academic-hat on, and as someone who has for the last six years closely followed and engaged with the institutional agenda as well as the youth-led and youth-serving civil society community that works within its scope.
A Product of its Time (and Environment)
The 3rd report comes at an interesting time for the agenda and UN politics more broadly—on YPS, next year is the tenth anniversary of the first resolution, yet funding and substantive support for the agenda is struggling. At the UN, institutionally momentum, attention, and resources are being directed to this year’s Summit of the Future and the UNSG’s Our Common Agenda, yet catastrophic global events are revealing the weaknesses in the function and authority of the UN.
In this landscape, the 3rd report reads very much as an institutional defence of existing activity, unlike the previous two reports which were more ambitious calls for change.
In 2020, the first report describes itself as “a call for accelerated implementation”, while the 2nd report in 2022 recognised:
The renewal of the social contract requires a deepening of intergenerational solidarity and a focus on the meaningful, diverse and effective engagement of young people, within and outside the United Nations. The youth and peace and security agenda is a powerful vehicle for realizing these goals…
This year, the report defers the recognition of youth inclusion and leadership to other documents, speaking only of the ‘contribution’ of youth and putting the onus on young people who “should champion” UN principles. It is worth reproducing this paragraph in full because it provides an opportunity to consider the framing and positioning of the agenda by the report:
4. According to the report of the Secretary-General entitled “Our Common Agenda” (A/75/982), young people should champion the universal application of the United Nations principles and foster trust within and among States. They should actively contribute to building intergenerational solidarity, trust in governments and inclusive institutions. Institutionalizing and adequately resourcing the youth and peace and security agenda is crucial to achieving this goal. The contribution of young people to identifying innovative solutions to global challenges and enhancing the legitimacy of peace and security initiatives is also recognized in the Secretary- General’s policy brief on meaningful youth engagement in policymaking and decision-making processes (A/77/CRP.1/Add.2).
The report invokes Our Common Agenda to tell youth that they should champion UN principles and foster trust within and among States. However, we know from extensive evidence—including that cited later in the 3rd report as well as the two preceding reports—that the trust deficit of youth with institutions cannot be fixed by youth themselves, but rather institutions must work to (re)gain young people’s trust in a global environment of shrinking civic space, repression, and less democratic environments.
The SG’s policy brief on meaningful youth engagement for Our Common Agenda does in fact talk about the challenges facing youth in enacting their civic commitments. But for a document written to an audience of institutional and State stakeholders, the SG report on YPS cannot defer responsibility for action to youth themselves as the opening framing of the report (regardless of the fact that later in the document they do make recommendations to States and UN bodies).
In many ways, SG reports (on any thematic agenda, not just YPS) will always be a disappointment to all parties in some ways. SG Reports are profoundly political and politicised documents. Because it is a report ‘of’ the Secretary-General and the audience is the Security Council, it has a tendency to reflect Member State and institutional initiatives and successes, and previous reports have been criticised for not reflecting youth voices that contributed to the process.
While the penholders for drafting will be a UN body—in the case of YPS that is UNFPA—the draft is submitted to the UNSG’s office where it can be edited, revised, deleted. So even within the UN itself, different actors find their contributions more or less represented. Youth-led and youth-serving civil society actors also find the SG reports a frustrating process, where their input and contributions are not always felt to be represented.
This year, the penholders engaged in meetings with the CSO Working Group on YPS to try and improve the engagement process. However, such processes are limited by broader factors including timelines beyond the control of the participants, and lack of resourcing both within the UN, but also within civil society who are already stretched thin before being asked to report at short notice.
Achievements
The existence of the requirement to report every two years is an important accountability mechanism for the YPS agenda. YPS is not as thoroughly ‘institutionalised’ as other thematic agendas, so the success in 2018 of getting a regular report was a significant achievement. This year’s report also recommends that the UNSC holds an annual SC open debate on YPS (73.b), which is another step towards ensuring attention is maintained. This is especially valuable given the 2nd report in 2022 was not discussed in an open debate due to ‘more urgent’ geopolitical considerations and a less formal Arria formula meeting was finally held in December. There will hopefully be an Open Debate to discuss the 3rd SG report next month, which will be timely and important.
The biennial report requires UN entities, Member States and other actors to take stock of what they have been doing in relation to the agenda. This is always an imperfect and political process, but provides an opportunity to account for what has been happening—and to analyse what these actors think is important on YPS.
There are also other successes included in the report, including particularly more concrete engagement with the agenda from regional bodies and at national levels. As always, any policy or framework must be scrutinised for its development and implementation, but the broader adoption of the agenda amongst a diversity of stakeholders and in all regions, is worthy of note and celebration.
Leaving aside the issue of counting the number of young people in the room, which I discuss below, it is also heartening to see YPS being reported as being integrated within UN programs and bodies. Specific efforts to bring together insights from disparate programs, shared indicators for YPS national action plans, and training for wider UN staff on the agenda and broader youth-responsive programming, are all positive signs of the integral components of the agenda being taken seriously within institutional processes.
Not everything that can be counted counts
There have been ongoing calls for better ‘data’ on YPS for years. It was at a similar point (about nine years after Resolution 1325) that WPS advocates started making sustained noise for disaggregated data gathering on that agenda—and while there were and are ongoing complexities to the counting, we can see it is from the calls of advocates that data collection improved for that agenda .
As I noted in my preview post at the beginning of the year, I was hopeful that the SG report would pay attention to the implementation and the responsibilities of Member States and other actors, but more than this that the “quality of inclusion and participation” must be central. The 3rd report does not dedicate a focus to monitoring and evaluation or indicators, however there is one key mention of efforts (para53).
53. At the global level, there are ongoing efforts to better measure United Nations contributions to advancing the youth and peace and security agenda, for example through specific indicators for Sustainable Development Goal 16 on youth-sensitive peace and security-related programming. UNDP, UNFPA and UN-Women adopted a common output indicator on their support for developing youth and peace and security national frameworks, demonstrating United Nations commitment to scaling up country-level implementation of the agenda. During the reporting period, the integration of the youth and peace and security agenda into the strategic plans within the United Nations increased, from 9 entities to 22, comprising 14 United Nations entities, 1 peacekeeping operation and 7 special political missions.
The indicators developed by organs such as UNDPPA and the Peacebuilding Commission are some of the most concrete to date among institutions working on YPS. While these are largely still focused on counting how many young people are present, they go some way to opening spaces for the meaningful contributions of youth—they have to be in the room to make a contribution, so its a start but not far enough.
Once again the SG report includes not only text but graphs counting the number of ‘references’ to youth in UNSC documents (illustratively, see figure above). The presence of youth in meetings, or the inclusion of them as a population to be considered, are both valuable steps however are fundamentally insufficient standards of success in reporting on institutionalising an agenda like YPS.
With my teacher-hat on, I am reminded of conversations I often have with my undergraduate students who present ‘facts’ in their essays that are simply descriptions of events. “So what?” I write in the margins, “what are the implications or effects of this?”.
Similarly, I read the in the SG’s report that “[t]hree young people briefed the Security Council in 2022 and four in 2023, compared with nine in 2020 and six in 2021…” and immediately want to know “but what did they say?”, “what did the UN do with the information they provided in their remarks?”. Essentially: “what changed due to their participation?”. If there are not answers to these questions, then their inclusion—both in the UNSC debates, and in the ‘accounting’ in the SG’s report—can only be described as tokenistic.
Sally Engle Merry, writing in her much lauded book, The Seduction of Quantification, observed “quantification has a great deal to contribute to global knowledge…but it is important to resist its seductive claim to truth.” There is a fundamental tension here: we do lack detailed knowledge on the multiple dimensions of YPS, and more of this information would be useful. However, ‘counting’ is not sufficient unless we are interrogating what is being counted, how it is been collected, and for what purpose.
The maxim “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts” remains a useful touchstone in resisting the quantification of YPS without ensuring there is real impact and change for young people and their communities on the frontlines of the myriad of challenges the SG report itself notes exists at the present moment. Young people themselves should be asked ‘what counts?’, and what would be useful data for them to undertake their daily peace work, not just for self-congratulatory graphics in an SG report.
Citations as politics
Having just critiqued the practice of counting as being insufficient, I do want to note one quantatitve measure that is worth further scrutiny. This SG report is the same length as the 2nd report (20 pages). This report has only seven footnotes, whereas there were 29 footnotes in 2022, and 24 footnotes in the first report in 2020.
Obviously, numbers are not sufficient to tell a story. So, when we look at the content of these footnotes, we can see a dramatic decline in the referencing of substantive reports, briefs, research, and policy documents. Of the seven footnotes in this report one defines the age of youth, one is the standard disclaimer on Kosovo, one clarifies how ‘youth briefers’ to the UNSC were counted, and then four are to substantive documents—two to the UN and Body Shop ‘Be Seen, Be Heard’ campaign, one to a WHO note (no link), and one to a USAID policy brief on financing.
To be fair, there are some other reports and documents referenced in the body of the report, including work by researchers at Glasgow University on inclusive peace processes, and a variety of UN reports, but are not given details and hyperlinks.
Calls from within and beyond the UN system for more ‘evidence-based’ research, more ‘data’, more work on YPS and adjacent topics have been loud and sustained over the past few years. And practitioners, academics, and policymakers have responded, generating a wide variety of resources. The absence of meaningful engagement with these resources hampers efforts to bolster the agenda’s influence and legitimacy.
There is also a reputational politics at play—the UN SG’s report is a document that legitimises activities and actors. Being mentioned carries weight and affective power both within the UN and beyond for youth-led and youth-serving organisations who get mentioned, or Member States whose initiatives are validated via their inclusion. What does and doesn’t get mentioned, just as what does and doesn’t get referenced fully, matters for the shape of the agenda to come.
One of the things I was impressed by in earlier reports was the citations to scholarship and practice driven resources. It is a missed opportunity that more was not done to ground the reporting in this year’s report in the ‘evidence-based’ data that has been repeatedly called for.
(I am) a nit-picking academic
While I’m being particular about citation politics, the politics of data, and the legitimising authority of formally issued documents like the SG reports, as an academic who is concerned with the way in which narratives come to be authorised and ‘truth’ I also found inconsistencies in the report both annoying at best and concerning at worst.
I make these observations recognising that if institutional work on YPS was properly, fully, sustainably funded, if it was taken seriously and resourced appropriately, many of these oversights would probably not exist. Those who are doing the internal work on the agenda are working under pressure, with very limited resources, and timelines beyond their control.
With that said, there are some issues.
As a starting point, the first line of the report is incorrect. It is in fact the second YPS resolution, Resolution 2419 (2018) that calls for the biennial SG report on YPS, not 2535 (2020). It was in 2020 that the first SG report was released. [edited 18-May: I am leaving the original text here, but would note that this first line of the SG report is technically correct, as the third resolution did call for a report on all three resolutions, which is necessary to refer the SG reports to the whole policy-architecture as it is updated. It follows a technocratic model of UNSC resolutions to refer to the most recent resolution, and not to detail the historical lineage]
Calls to ensure the safety of youth briefers after speaking at the UN are crucial and persistent. It is great that the report notes this is a continuing issue and that internal guidance to “support and safeguard the meaningful and safe participation of youth briefers in the Council” (para 25). However, the ‘Engaging Safely at the UN’ training that is also mentioned is not about preventing "intimidation and reprisals for cooperation with the United Nations”, but about how young people can avoid being sexually harassed while at the UN (also important, but not the same). This slippage of ‘evidence’ is worth reflecting on.
On this, it is highly interesting to me that the Youth Office is mentioned several times, but the (recently departed) SG’s Envoy on Youth, Jayathma Wickramanayake, is not mentioned at all. Yes, the Youth Office was established by the UNGA in 2022, but the new ASG for Youth Affairs didn’t commence until the end of last year. To take the ‘Engaging Safely’ training as an example— this was not produced by the ‘Youth Office’ but by the Office of the SG’s Envoy on Youth. While these things are not significant, and as always there are politics at play, it sits uncomfortably with me that work that has been done is being misattributed.
Finally, on National Action Plans for YPS, a whole other post could (and probably will!) be written about them, but just to note that the SG report is technically correct that there have been two new NAPYPS “launched”; but the Philippines “launched” their NAPYPS in 2022, yet it still does not exist publicly anywhere for scrutiny or engagement. Once again, performative ‘success’ must not be mistaken for substantive progress.
Being bold, looking forward
Despite my criticisms and concerns here, it is always heartening to see an accounting of different initiatives, efforts, programs, and policies on YPS. I would have loved to see an SG report that looked forward and gave direction to advocates and key stakeholders, and it was disappointing to find the report was quite ‘safe’ in its retrospective reporting focus.
This ‘safeness’ is of course also a product of the environment. Bold visions are enabled by vocal support and substantive resourcing. While stakeholders feel YPS is not integral to global peace and security, while they continue to ignore the evidence that shows the benefits of meaningfully including youth, resourcing their peacebuilding work, supporting their leadership, and ensuring their ability to continue their work, YPS has an uphill battle.
The report calls once again for meaningful funding, for mainstreaming youth into existing programatic priorities and plans. The recommendations that are most substantive on this fall on Member States and regional organisations, who have the pathways to effect meaningful change in the ways in which they include young people going forward. The agenda must also be meaningfully and securely resourced within the UN itself also, to ensure effective advocacy, diplomacy, and direction.
Finally, as an institutional document, written ‘by’ the SG for the UN community, there is an absence of youth voices in the SG’s reports. This is to be expected in some ways. Young people only ‘count’ when they participate in an institutional initiative or attend a UN meeting. I want to hear more from youth, more of what they are doing, what they have been achieving, what they want from and for the agenda going forward. If there is a millionaire philanthropist out there reading this, you should invest in sustained support for a CSO mechanism for YPS, enable them to write a resourced shadow-report, fund their engagement and shared capacity building. Root the agenda in the leadership and expertise of those it purports to enable.
As the agenda turns 10 next year, I hope this SG report is used as leverage to consolidate these goals, and to seek commitments from stakeholders on ensuring a robust and rich second decade of meaningful and substantive youth leadership on peace and security. Looking at the world at present, it seems more urgent than ever before.