Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” At the UN Youth Compass in Paris, a panelist invoked the line to underscore the structural exclusion of youth from policymaking. Although used in a different context, the quote clearly reflects a reality many young people experience: policies shaping our futures are frequently made without us, and often to our detriment.
As a UNA Canada representative at the UN Youth Compass in Paris, I joined a global dialogue centred on this very problem. The conversation was grounded in new evidence from UNESCO and the UN Youth Office showing a stark gap between governments’ claims of engagement and young people’s actual influence. While many states report consulting youth, only one in three countries has formal mechanisms that allow young people to participate in policymaking, and even where those mechanisms exist, only one in ten youth organisations believes their input meaningfully shapes outcomes.
That absence of real policymaking power helps explain what many describe as a growing wave of Gen Z protest across the world. At the UN Youth Compass in Paris, conversations with youth leaders pointed to a shared conclusion: this surge reflects systems that have yet to create meaningful entry points for participation. When those pathways are missing, frustration can build and surface in visible forms of dissent. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” In Paris, this was understood not as an endorsement of confrontation, but as a warning that highlights the need to create meaningful, inclusive avenues for engagement before frustration escalates.
Today, people under 30 make up more than half of the global population. They are the primary stakeholders in education, climate governance, technological change, and democratic renewal. Yet they are still too often treated as beneficiaries of policy rather than co-authors of it. This is both a democratic failure and a strategic risk, as systems designed without youth input struggle to earn youth trust, and trust is the foundation of democratic stability.
When no bridge exists between young people and decision-makers, polarization fills the space. When that bridge is built well, youth become partners in governing complexity rather than outsiders reacting to it. For their to be a future that adequately represents those it governs, meaningful youth engagement cannot remain exceptional, it must become norm.
Carney’s warning in his Davos speech ultimately returns us to a simple democratic truth: if young people are not structurally present at the table, decisions will continue to be made about them without them. A generation that constitutes the majority of the world cannot remain an audience to its own future. The task ahead is to build systems where youth participation is expected, protected, and consequential. Otherwise, young people remain on the menu, shaped by decisions they had no power in making.
BIO: Darcy Eygun is a francophone student and researcher from Nova Scotia whose work focuses on the intersection of human rights and security, including fieldwork in Lithuania, Colombia, The Gambia, and Malawi.
