A Brief History — and a Familiar Tension
In 1995, when many millennials were just being born, the UN General Assembly adopted the World Programme of Action for Youth on Participation (WPAY), issuing a then-bold call for the "full and effective participation of youth in the life of society and in decision-making." WPAY marked one of the first global acknowledgments that young people should not merely be beneficiaries of policy, but active participants in shaping it. It reflected a simple yet enduring principle: young people are experts in their own lives, and policies that affect them are better when young people help design them.
That principle gained renewed urgency two decades later with the adoption of the Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda. In 2015, UN Security Council Resolution 2250 recognized young people as essential actors in peacebuilding and conflict prevention. Ten years later, Resolution 2807 reinforced this trajectory, urging greater youth participation in shaping shared futures and pushing the conversation beyond presence toward shared decision-making.
The UN, however, is only one example of a much broader institutional reckoning. Governments at national and local levels — including across the Global South and through regional bodies such as the African Union — along with the European Union, the World Bank Group, and reform-oriented philanthropies are experimenting with new models of youth partnership. Youth- and child-focused organizations, too, are reassessing their approaches, recognizing that meaningful youth engagement requires institutional change — not just new programs.
In this context, 2026 marks a transition from commitment to consequence. More than a year into Resolution 2807's implementation, and following the 30th anniversary of WPAY — marked by the UN General Assembly's first high-level, mandated meeting focused on youth — the arc of progress is clear. The adoption of the Pact for the Future in 2024, with a full chapter dedicated to youth and explicit commitments to mainstream meaningful youth participation across decision-making at all levels, signals a historic intergovernmental consensus among all 193 Member States.
What matters now is delivery. The challenge is how governments operationalize these commitments — and how other institutions, including multilateral, philanthropic, and civil society actors, transform their cultures, systems, and processes to embed youth inclusion as standard practice. The hard question is how youth-inclusive policymaking becomes business as usual: moving beyond surface-level inclusion toward approaches that are deeper, more durable, and more influential.
The Participation Paradox
Across public institutions, development agencies, and philanthropic strategies, youth participation in policymaking is now treated as a necessity rather than a nice-to-have. The logic is straightforward: policies shaped with young people tend to be more relevant, legitimate, and resilient over time. And the implementation of these youth-design policies deliver higher returns on investment than policies designed without youth participation.
Policies shaped with young people tend to be more relevant, legitimate, and resilient over time.
Yet many efforts remain shallow or episodic — limited to consultations, advisory bodies, or high-profile forums with little real decision-making authority. This gap between aspiration and reality reveals a familiar paradox: institutions call for youth partnership, but invest far less in the conditions that make partnership work.
Too often, shortcomings are attributed to young people themselves — their readiness, skills, or experience — and mischaracterized as "youth apathy." In reality, the gap is equally institutional. Policymakers and civil servants are trained to manage risk, consult stakeholders, and control decision-making processes, but far less prepared to share authority, navigate generational power dynamics, or value lived experience alongside technical expertise.
At its core, meaningful youth partnership requires a cultural shift — from viewing young people as beneficiaries to recognizing them as equal partners in shaping decisions. This transformation demands new skills and mindsets: comfort with uncertainty, openness to co-creation, and a willingness to redesign processes that were never intentionally structured to include youth as shared decision-makers. Without these shifts, youth engagement too often becomes extractive — soliciting input without redistributing power.
This paradox is especially consequential today. The world is home to the largest generation of young people in history — 1.3 billion people between the ages of 10 and 24, with those under 30 making up nearly half of the global population, most living in low- and middle-income countries — yet political and economic institutions remain overwhelmingly shaped and led by older cohorts. The result is a widening mismatch between who is most affected by long-term policy decisions and who holds sustained influence over them. Closing this gap will require more than expanding participation; it will require building institutional capacity for genuine intergenerational partnership.
What's Changing in Global Policy Spaces — and What Isn't
Over the past decade, youth engagement has moved from the margins of global policy discourse toward the center, particularly within multilateral institutions. Frameworks such as Youth2030, the Secretary-General's Policy Brief on Meaningful Youth Engagement, and the UN's Core Principles for Meaningful Youth Participation all signal a growing consensus: young people should be engaged across policy design, implementation, and review — not only as beneficiaries or advocates, but as contributors.
These frameworks have fueled an increasing proliferation of participation mechanisms. Youth delegate programs, global forums, and consultations linked to climate, peace, and sustainable development agendas are increasingly becoming commonplace. Youth presence is higher and more visible than ever before. Yet genuine influence has not increased at the same pace. Young people remain largely excluded from agenda-setting, budgetary decisions, and policy trade-offs — the stages where power is most concentrated.
A similar pattern is evident at institutions such as the World Bank Group, where youth engagement has increasingly been framed as a matter of accountability and development effectiveness. Initiatives like the World Bank Youth Summit reflect this shift, yet sustained progress depends heavily on institutional changes. Organizational systems and incentives are rarely designed for sustained intergenerational partnership. Access has expanded faster than authority and real power have shifted.
Taken together, these trends mark a critical inflection point. Youth engagement is no longer a question of if — but of how, and to what end.
The Missing Middle
As participation opportunities have expanded, a familiar pattern has emerged: access does not automatically translate into influence. Many initiatives assume that once young people are invited into policy spaces, meaningful engagement will follow. Experience suggests otherwise, and at worst, has at times resulted in superficial or other tokenistic engagement.
Youth engagement efforts often focus on who is at the table, rather than how participants are supported once they arrive — or which young people are able to access these spaces in the first place.
Policy environments reward fluency in institutional norms, the ability to frame ideas under constraint, and comfort navigating power dynamics that are rarely explicit. As a result, participation frequently skews toward those already closest to power. And, across sectors, young people are most often consulted on problem identification, far less involved in shaping priorities or trade-offs, and rarely engaged through implementation or evaluation.
This "missing middle" reflects an institutional challenge, not a youth deficit. Internal systems were not designed for intergenerational partnership, and staff often lack clear pathways for translating youth input into decisions. When participation is not matched with preparation — on both sides — it risks generating frustration rather than impact.
Creative Youth Development as Policy Infrastructure
Creative Youth Development (CYD) enters this conversation from an unexpected angle — and that is precisely its value. Often associated with arts or enrichment, CYD is rarely discussed as policy infrastructure. Yet at its core, CYD builds agency, collaboration, critical thinking, and voice — the very capacities meaningful policy engagement depends on.
CYD is a practice grounded in positive youth development, using creativity as the pathway through which young people build belonging, skills, and confidence to lead. It integrates creative inquiry with youth development principles, supporting identity formation, systems awareness, and collective problem-solving. Research consistently shows that sustained participation in high-quality creative programs strengthens self-efficacy, communication, and social connection — capacities that are essential, not incidental, in policymaking contexts.
CYD functions as upstream civic infrastructure. It prepares young people to engage institutions before they enter formal decision-making spaces, while modeling the very behaviors — listening, co-creation, iteration — that institutions themselves seek to embed.
What Creative Youth Development Offers Institutions
While CYD is most often discussed in terms of youth outcomes, its institutional value is equally significant. In an era of declining trust and rapid change, CYD offers a practical framework for renewal.
First, it helps institutions renew legitimacy by embedding cultural expression, storytelling, and lived experience into policy processes — enabling institutions to listen in ways that feel authentic rather than technocratic. This bridges policy intent and public meaning.
Second, CYD provides a disciplined mechanism for creativity inside bureaucratic systems. Unlike ad hoc innovation labs, it normalizes experimentation and learning as ongoing practice, grounded in real constituencies and anchored in equity and inclusion.
Third, CYD offers a tested model for power-aware participation. It addresses who sets agendas, whose knowledge counts, and how voice translates into authority — moving beyond symbolic engagement toward shared accountability.
Finally, CYD brings a developmental lens to systems change, recognizing that trust and civic habits form over time; that identity shapes how policies are experienced; and that reform is cumulative, not episodic.
In short, Creative Youth Development does more than prepare young people for civic life. It helps institutions become more adaptive without abandoning their values.
Burberry Inspire: What Preparation Looks Like at Scale
The Burberry Inspire program illustrates how Creative Youth Development can operate at global scale. Developed through a partnership between The Burberry Foundation and the International Youth Foundation (IYF), the program integrates creative practice — storytelling, design, performance — with mentoring and collaboration across multiple countries.
Evaluations show gains in self-efficacy, aspiration, and a sense of agency — foundational capacities that underpin later civic participation and leadership. The program's significance lies less in immediate policy outcomes than in what it enables upstream: investing in readiness before young people are asked to navigate policy systems directly.
From Creative Practice to Civic Capacity
Creative practice does not turn young people into policy experts overnight. What it builds is civic capacity: confidence, curiosity, and competence to engage complex systems over time. Creative spaces are often where young people first practice collective problem-solving, grapple with ambiguity, and negotiate difference — experiences that closely mirror policymaking itself.
CYD does not replace youth councils or advisory bodies; it strengthens the conditions — and pathways — that allow those mechanisms to work. It expands who feels entitled — and equipped — to shape shared futures.
What Institutions and Funders Should Do Next
If the past decade focused on getting young people into policy conversations, the next must focus on ensuring those conversations matter. That requires treating youth development as part of the policy ecosystem, investing in institutional readiness, and evolving success metrics beyond participation counts.
Youth preparation without institutional change leads to frustration. Institutional reform without youth readiness leads to symbolism. Real partnership depends on doing both — together and over time.
Young people are ready. The invitation now is for institutions to meet them there — and invest accordingly.