Bringing Depth to the High-level Political Forum: A Youth Perspective on Global Governance and Sustainable Development
Grace Alberts
Director of Operations – UNA-Canada SDG Council
About My HLPF Experience
Three years ago, I stumbled upon the intersection of international affairs and sustainable development in a compulsory university class. Three months ago, I was teaching my students the ins and outs of a simulated HLPF in that very same class. Now, I’ve experienced the real thing for myself.
As a UNA-Canada delegate, my goal for HLPF was to get a better sense of some of the approaches to SDGs that are happening around the world and promote some of the unique strategies that we’re seeing in Canada. As the Director of Operations for the SDG Council at UNA-Canada, I’ve been closely involved with the development of youth-led projects across the country to identify and close the gaps in our national approach to sustainable development. I wanted to participate in HLPF to learn how I can better support my SDG Leads and to highlight the incredible work that they are doing. Representing UNA-Canada, and Canada as a whole, was an incredibly special experience. I felt an immense responsibility to accurately represent Canadian youth, and thanks to the willing participants in every room I found myself, I can confidently say that my advocacy has had a tangible impact. This is the privilege of a lifetime, and something that I am incredibly grateful for.
A Memorable Moment
This feeling was exemplified by a session convened by Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Jobs and Families Annie Koutrakis, Member of Parliament for Vimy. She and her team gathered all of the Canadian youth attending HLPF for a roundtable; however instead of positioning herself and Mercedes Morin, Director of the Sustainable Development Goals Unit at Employment and Social Development Canada, as the experts (which they would have been well within their right to do), they flipped the format. They offered the space to ask us as youth about our perspectives on sustainable development and engaging young people in Canada. This format made me feel genuinely heard, and I feel confident that some of the recommendations we offered are being seriously considered and will translate to real action. This challenged my previous attitude towards youth forums convened by government officials; generally there is a sense of obligatory engagement from the officials in the room, and there is an understanding between all parties that this conversation is nothing more than a check in the box. The session the PS Koutrakis led could not have been any more different from my preconceived notions. Everyone listened attentively. They spent nearly twice as long with us as they were originally scheduled to in order to hear from every person in the room. They conceded the shortcomings we identified and did not hide behind scripted deflections of criticism. For nearly two hours, we were all equals in the room, trying our best to find solutions on how we can all do better for the sake of our country, and the world.
My Three Key Takeaways
1. Engagement between youth is incredibly productive.
My primary takeaway from the week was reflected in this session with PS Koutrakis, and it remained prevalent in every other room I had to fortune of being in that week: Youth working together are unstoppable. I kept a running tally of the number of new people that I had substantive conversations with over the course of the week (65 in total, unfortunately shy of my goal of 100, but still a result I’m blown away by as someone who previously despised initiating networking). Of those 65 new people, over half were youth. And every conversation left me feeling both inspired and with action items. Without the liberty of sharing too many details, I initiated collaborations between the SDG Council and other youth organizations in Canada, learned from the experiences that others have had with the SDGs, and have a number of fresh perspectives to bring back to my SDG Leads on the Council. In my eyes, this is the pinnacle of SDG 17: Partnership for the Goals. It is also proof that youth aren’t waiting for policymakers to respond to our pleas for a sustainable future; we’re carving our own way through civil society.
2. The growing sentiment that UN bodies are obsolete is ill-informed.
It’s important to be critical and skeptical of the institutions we engage with, particularly if you, like me, are a self-proclaimed institutionalist. I believe that coordinated action between States through bodies like the United Nations is critical to solving any global issue, and that, flawed as they may be, we would be overall worse off without them. At the same time, I believe that the only way these institutions can operate equitably and with the greatest success is if we remain hypervigilant regarding the assessment of their internal processes and maintain capacity building initiatives within Member States.
All of this is to say, the perspective that the United Nations is only good for hosting expensive conferences where delegates spin their wheels in opulent rooms with no tangible impact is misguided. While I can understand how this conclusion has been reached, it is nowhere near the experience that I had at HLPF. I believe this to be a communications issue: many of the official sessions are ‘just’ talk. These high-level speeches outlining theories and principles, but which fall short of delivering action items, are what anecdotally receive the most attention in reporting. These are not representative of the conference as a whole, it is the side-events that allow progress to shine, where delegates are sharing their successes and making recommendations for one another. There wasn’t a single side event I attended that didn’t end in side conversations with the session facilitators where new project ideas and avenues for collaboration emerged. This is the very progress and action that forums such as HLPF are accused of stifling, and yet these opportunities abound. They just so happen to abound outside the constraints of formal sessions.
3. There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful.
Statistics were left, right, and center at HLPF. Many of these stats related to the progress we’ve made on the SDGs thus far, which are not even close to 50% implemented, let alone 100% implemented, with just four years to go in the 2030 Agenda. Yikes. Despite this, I left HLPF feeling more hopeful than ever. The moderator of the side event Strengthening SDG Acceleration and Multilateral Action: Civil Society on the Road to the 2027 SDG Summit, who’s name I am remiss to not have recorded, put it best: having a framework against which we can measure that we are coming up short is a success in and of itself. While a counterintuitive assertion, she went on to explain that having the tools to measure failure are far and away preferable to implementing an agenda with no way of knowing its status until the very end of the process. We have a clearer delineation of our successes and shortcomings on the SDGs than we ever have before, and we also have all of the tools and information that we need in order to close those gaps. This is particularly important for Canada, a country that is fortunate to have more than enough technical and resource capacity to follow through on the 2030 Agenda. The research and development have happened, now we need to act.
The Role of Youth in Advancing the SDGs
One of the ways that Canada can meaningfully progress the Sustainable Development Goals is through youth. This starts with removing the barriers to participation in this implementation pathway. We need more than a seat at the table – we need to have an equal opportunity as any other stakeholder to build that table, and our seats must be permanent if meaningful engagement is to occur. Many opportunities for youth to engage with sustainable development in Canada are also volunteer, require relocating, are poorly remunerated, or are any mix of these characteristics. During a cost-of-living crisis where youth are facing record high unemployment, many people cannot afford to give their time without appropriate compensation. This drastically narrows the pool of youth that can participate in engagement opportunities and thus creates unrepresentative conversations. If youth are expected to act as consultants, they should be billed like consultants.
With that being said, consultation is a limited capacity for engaging with youth. More opportunities for youth should be created in capacities that have typically been reserved for later-career experts. A prime example of this is the side event that UNA-Canada ran at HLPF – another one of my highlights from the week. As youth delegates, our CEO entrusted us to structure and facilitate the entire panel on our own. Not because the panel was branded as youth-led, not because youth issues were a topic of discussion, and not because it was expected from our panelists (in fact, this feature of the panel was a surprise to many of them). It was because of the quality of our work and the recognition that the differences between our lived experiences would be different from those of UNA-Canada senior leadership in a way that would benefit the panel. I want to emphasize that this was a panel like any other, it just so happened to be led by youth. This is a perspective that needs to be central in youth engagement: involving youth is important because of our contributions as humans, not just because of our status as young people.
What I Will Do Next
I left HLPF with an unexpected question circling my head: what was the specific impact of my being there? I knew I had had a personally life changing experience and that my career aspirations of environmental diplomacy were reaffirmed, but what were some of the greater-good benefits of my presence in that space? How did I wield the responsibility of speaking on behalf of an entire generation of Canadians? In my reflections, I’ve come to the conclusion that the impacts are twofold; they come both from the conversations that I initiated and, even more importantly, what I do with those conversations. I feel an intense obligation towards implementing some of the initiatives I dreamed up with fellow delegates, and so my next steps are as follows:
My next steps are:
- Scheduling meetings with the delegates I met at HLPF to start working on the partnerships we discussed.
- Digging into strategies for implementation and accountability for international agreements in my upcoming studies as a law student.
- Working with SDG Council members to amplify their projects in the broader sustainable development field in Canada.
Message to Other Young People
The first step towards getting involved in sustainable development work is betting on yourself. You have exactly what it takes, in fact, your skills and lived experience are exactly what this field of work needs. Don’t be shy of putting yourself out there. Apply for those positions, even when you’re sure there’s someone better suited to the post. Sign up for the mailing lists of organizations you’re inspired by so that you have your finger on the pulse of opportunities. Integrate the SDGs into the things that currently fill your time. When you’re outwardly passionate about something, you start seeing opportunity everywhere, and you become acquainted with others who share your passion. Suddenly, you’re part of a community doing meaningful work. Suddenly, you’re involved in exactly the thing that you were once unsure of how to become involved in. It may be a slow process, but it’s an important one, and it all begins with a commitment to starting.
Author Profile
Grace Alberts, Director of Operations – UNA-Canada SDG Council
She/her
Grace is an emerging sustainability professional, researcher, and educator based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She serves as the Director of Operations for the United Nations Association in Canada’s Sustainable Development Goals Council, where she works with youth across the country to design and implement projects that forward national commitments to the 2030 Agenda. Alongside her work administrating the SDG Council, she also leads a project analyzing Canada’s ratification of several International Environmental Agreements. In the fall, Grace will return to the classroom as a Juris Doctor candidate at the University of Ottawa. She intends to focus her studies on accountability measures for environmental protection in international law.
