On the occasion of the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024, the St. Gallen Symposium and the Club of Rome collaborated with partners to emphasise the potential of intergenerational leadership and learning

The United Nations Summit of the Future, held in September 2024, aimed to address pressing global challenges and enhance international cooperation. A key outcome was the adoption of the Pact for the Future, which includes a Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations. These agreements focus on sustainable development, climate change, digital cooperation, and human rights, with a strong emphasis on the needs and rights of younger generations.

Younger Generations at the Center of the Pact for the Future

For younger generations, the Summit underscored the importance of their active participation in global decision-making. In particular, Chapter 4 of the Pact, focuses on “Youth and Future Generations”, outlining several key actions:

Investing in Youth Development: Committing to the social and economic development of children and young people to help them reach their full potential.

Protecting Youth Rights: Promoting, protecting, and respecting the human rights of all young people, while fostering social inclusion and integration.

Enhancing Youth Participation Nationally: Strengthening meaningful youth participation at the national level, ensuring their voices are heard in policymaking processes.

Enhancing Youth Participation Internationally: Strengthening meaningful youth participation at the international level, including contributions to the UN Youth Fund to facilitate stronger youth engagement.

In addition, the Declaration on Future Generations highlights the importance of foresight and long-term thinking in policy-making, including through evidence-based, forward-looking impact assessments of today’s decisions, and a whole-of-government approach on the assessment, development, implementation and evaluation of policies that safeguard the needs and interests of future generations.

Two NGC Side-Events to Move From Idea to Impact and Action

The aim of the St. Gallen Symposium’s and the Club of Rome’s joint initiative for “A New Generational Contract” is to leverage intergenerational leadership and learning for a more regenerative economy. Given the Summit of the Future’s strong resonance with this vision, the two organisations, alongside diverse partners, engaged closely with the development of the Pact for the Future. This included an engagement with the language of the Pact in the months leading up to the Summit, incl. at the UN Civil Society Conference in May 2024 in Nairobi, Kenya.

In New York, the St. Gallen Symposium partnered with the NYU School of Professional Studies to host a joint dialogue on the theme of “Intergenerational Leadership for Sustainability and Innovation”, including the perspectives of Mamphela Ramphele, Honorary President of the Club of Rome, Derek Walker, the Future Generations Commission for Wales, Angela Sun, Member of the Board of Directors of Cushman & Wakefields and The Western Union, Pape Demba Kane, Executive Director of the African Leaders Factory.

The Club of Rome engaged with a collective of partners, including the UNESCO-Bridges coalition and Globethics, on the theme of “Mobilising the Outcomes of the Summit of the Future”, featuring, among others, Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General for the Social and Human Sciences at UNESCO, and Prof. Peter Schlosser, vice president and vice provost of Global Futures at Arizona State University.