By Max Genin, Youth Advisor, UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR); Steering Member, Pact for the Future Implementation Working Group on Youth, UN Youth Office.
The 2026 youth edition of the GEM Report, Lead with youth, contains a statistic that should give everyone working in this space pause. Of the youth and student organizations surveyed, 57% submitted feedback on education policy. Only 35% saw that feedback reflected in final decisions. Fewer than one in six were ever asked to monitor implementation.
The instinct, reading those numbers, is to conclude that governments aren’t listening. That diagnosis is wrong, or at least incomplete. And getting it wrong is precisely why we keep having the same conversation, publishing the same reports, and watching the same gap persist between what youth are promised and what actually changes.
I’ve spent the last several years working on both sides of this. I’ve drafted education legislation inside government, regulatory amendments that directly affected 200,000 teachers and 500,000 students in Ontario, Canada, and I’ve sat in rooms at OHCHR and the UN representing the people that legislation affects. What that experience taught me is that the problem isn’t that governments don’t listen to youth. The problem is that youth, by and large, are trying to change institutions using tools those institutions have no structural reason to respond to. The strategy is the gap.
The three buckets
Change in the international policy arena is driven by three things: power, money, and community.
Power is who controls the agenda, who appoints the committee chairs, who decides what gets on the docket. Money is who funds the process, who has the human and material capital, who can sustain a position across multiple negotiating cycles. Community is everything else: the coalitions, the campaigns, the conferences, the advocacy, the thought leadership, the workshops, the solidarity networks.
Youth live almost entirely in the community bucket. And community matters, it’s where change is sustained, where it is legitimized, where it ultimately lands. It’s how we got a UN Envoy on Youth in 2018. It’s how the climate crisis became a generational cause. It’s how youth-led protests have toppled governments from Bangladesh to Nepal. But community alone does not move power or money. Issuing statements, attending side events at UNGA, posting open letters, none of that registers as a credible threat or a credible offer to the people controlling the other two buckets. Sometimes it does, other times it doesn’t. And until it consistently does, the feedback forms will keep being filed and the policies will keep being written without us.
Shannon Koostachin understood this instinctively. In the late 2000s, a young Cree student living on a reserve in northern Ontario found herself attending school in a deteriorating portable building the federal government had simply stopped maintaining. Rather than accept it, she started campaigning. The campaign went national. Media attention grew. A private member’s bill was introduced to fund school construction in Indigenous communities. It passed. The government spent millions building schools that should never have been left to rot. It took years, and it only worked because Shannon eventually forced her way into the power bucket, the community pressure created the political cost, but the bill created the change.
I watched this dynamic reach its limit during a side event at UN General Assembly Week, co-hosted by the African Union. Ministers from multiple African countries were in the room alongside youth delegates from those same nations. When the ministers began describing their records on education, improved outcomes, better conditions, commitment to youth, the delegates interrupted them. Loudly. Not politely. They told them, to their faces, that they were lying. The chair had to use her gavel to restore order.
It was one of the most honest moments I have witnessed in a multilateral space. It was also a precise illustration of what community pressure looks like when it reaches its ceiling: pure, legitimate rage, with no structural leverage behind it. The ministers squirmed. Then the meeting ended, and they went back to their ministries, and the youth back to their events.
The tool we’re not using
There is a bridge between community and power that youth movements consistently underuse, and it is sitting in plain sight: international law.
A human rights-based approach does something strategically important that petitions and consultations do not. It reframes the relationship between young people and governments from a charitable one (e.g. “we’re asking you to consider our needs”) to an obligatory one. When a country has ratified a treaty, it has created a legal duty. Youth are not supplicants. They are rights-holders, and the state is a duty-bearer.
This is what I meant when I said, at the launch of this youth report in Paris, that education is a human right and it is “high time we stop asking for it, but rather, start expecting it”. That isn’t an attitude shift. It’s a legal argument. If your government has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child or the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, then the right to education, including the right to participate in shaping it, is not a courtesy they can extend or withdraw. It is an obligation they have already accepted.
This is not theoretical. In March 2026, the Core Principles for Meaningful Youth Participation in Intergovernmental Processes and UN Work were published under the Secretary-General’s authority and promoted to all 195 UN member states, the first time the system has formally defined what meaningful youth engagement actually requires. The document exists because enough people in the right positions decided that aspiration needed to become obligation. The question now is whether youth organizations will use it as the instrument it was designed to be.
The practical implication is this: when you walk into a consultation, don’t walk in asking for engagement. Walk in citing the specific treaty obligations your government has already signed, the specific articles that require youth participation in education policymaking, and the specific gap between those obligations and the process you are currently being invited to participate in. You are not making a request. You are documenting non-compliance.
What ‘expecting’ actually requires
None of this means abandoning community. It means being strategic about what community is for. Coalitions matter not because collective noise changes minds at the top, but because they build the political cost of ignoring you. Campaigns matter not because a viral post moves policy, but because they shift the salience of an issue until a politician calculates that ignoring it costs more than addressing it. Community is the pressure. Law is the lever.
The youth edition of the GEM Report recommends that governments establish formal mechanisms in legislation requiring youth participation in education decision-making. That is correct. But legislation without enforcement is just another document. The youth organizations that actually move policy, of which there are examples in this report from Colombia, Norway and Slovakia, are the ones that understood the difference between being consulted and having standing. They showed up knowing the treaty obligations, the budget line, the decision timeline, and the name of the person with signing authority. They made it more expensive to exclude them than to include them.
What needs to change first is not government willingness. It is the technical fluency of youth organizations themselves, their ability to walk into a room knowing the treaty, the budget cycle, and how decisions actually get made. Prepared, diplomatic, and unapologetically relentless and bold in their pursuit. Governments respond to people who speak their language. Build that capacity, and the willingness tends to follow.
Stop asking. Know your rights – and use them.
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