Thus, this study is an outcome of a youth-led participatory action research on assessing leadership, participation and inclusion of young people in the implementation of the Youth, Peace & Security (YPS) agenda at the national level.

Important progress has been made since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2250 in 2015. The UNSCR 2250 presents an all-encompassing framework for YPS around five pillars: participation, protection, prevention, disengagement and reintegration, and partnerships. Building upon it, UNSCR 2419 (in 2018) calls for an increasing role of youth in negotiating and implementing peace agreements and UNSCR 2535 (in 2020) emphasized protecting civic and political spaces for youth, diversifying youth participation and implementation through dedicated roadmaps with sufficient resources & through a participatory process. The Missing Peace report, published in September 2018, is an independent progress study on youth and peace and security. The second independent progress study is currently being developed. The UN Secretary General has been publishing biennial reports on YPS since 2020. More than 100 agencies, including UN agencies, INGOs, CSOs and youth-led organisations, are leading and shaping global policy and practices around YPS through the Global Coalition on Youth, Peace & Security. Overall, YPS seems to represent a significant and well-established thematic agenda for the UN Security Council, so it’s important to understand its relevance as an area of participation-in-practice beyond the Council Chambers or Headquarters.

While the global Youth, Peace & Security (YPS) agenda moves from policy to implementation, it is crucial to ensure young people or youth-led organizations are meaningfully part of coalition building efforts, national action plans (NAPs) development and implementation, policy formulation and also monitoring implementation efforts. This was also recognized in the most recent YPS resolution adopted by the UNSC in July 2020. UNSCR 2535 encouraged the Member States and regional and subregional organizations to develop participatory processes, in particular with young people and youth organizations and to pursue the implementation of the YPS agenda. Yet, international peace and security institutions spent very little or no effort to analyse and monitor youth participation, leadership and ownership in operationalizing the YPS agenda.

Currently, at the national level, there are coalition-building efforts, national action plans (NAPs), policies, roadmaps or similar mechanisms put in place to implement the YPS agenda in more than a dozen of countries. There is a varying degree of youth participation in these efforts. In some of them, young people lead and shape these efforts collaboratively with their governments. In others, young people are excluded from the processes, or at best, consulted. While in some others, youth are waiting for other stakeholders to understand the need for collaborative implementation efforts and thus join the coalitions. This study compares and contrasts youth participation in coalition-building and national action plans (NAPs) development and implementation efforts.

This ongoing study, since December 2018, has been conducted through key informant interviews with young people who are engaged or interested in engaging in national-level implementation efforts in these countries. These interviews shed light on different ways in which young people influence implementation efforts. In this study, we examine the three dimensions of the YPS agenda implementation:

the implementation of the agenda at the national level, primarily through the development of national networks/coalitions, strategies and adoption of National Action Plans (NAPs);
the stakeholder engagement in leading and supporting these implementation efforts; and
the avenues for and level of youth participation in these implementation efforts.

This website visually* presents the analysed content, collected and translated so far. The first report on the key findings from our analysis was published in April 2022 and is accessible at https://ypsmonitor.com/research.

Methodology

We began by collecting all publicly available content on YPS implementation since December 2015. From December 2018, to gain a better sense of the quality of the processes, one-on-one semi-formal discussions were conducted with young peacebuilders for each of these countries, using a listening and learning methodology. Some data points (country, region and year of small milestones) were easily drawn from various reports and concept notes. However, assessing types of implementation and quality, and level of participation, occasionally requires subjective assessment. There is a great deal of variation amongst these processes, so there is an element of interpretive analysis necessary when making these conclusions. It should also be noted that these findings are based solely on our interpretation of the information shared by young people who are somehow engaged in these processes at the national level. We do not evaluate the accuracy of the young people’s experience beyond critical thinking questions during the dialogue. Further research would be required to engage with the question of accuracy in each country context on a case-by-case basis.

Types of national YPS Implementation:

YPS Coalition/Network
National Action Plan (NAP)

Levels of youth participation in national implementation efforts

Direct participation in leadership: Youth led, shared decision making with Govt/UN/INGO/CSO.
Direct participation by being present in the room: Govt/UN/INGO/CSO led, shared decision making with youth, with sufficient youth-agency building.
Direct participation but window-dressing: Govt/UN/INGO/CSO led, shared decision making with youth, but insufficient youth-agency building.
Informative: Govt/UN/INGO/CSO led, youth are informed.
Consultation: Youth consulted ad-hoc.
Exclusion partial: Youth and INGO/CSOs led but not supported by Government.
Exclusion severe: Youth led but not supported by Government or CSOs.
Exclusion complete: Youth excluded (neither informed nor supported).
Competing stands: two different initiatives, each led by youth and Govt/UN/INGO/CSO.
Doesn't exist yet.
Work in progress.

How to reference this resource

The website and content analysis provided can be referenced as: Upadhyay, Mridul (2020) YPS Monitor: Content Analysis and Data Visualisation, Online, at https://www.ypsmonitor.com/