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SECTION 2: YOUTH WORKING AND ORGANIZING FOR ACTION
YOUTH PARTICIPATION IN GLOBAL DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES
Introduction
The inspiration for this chapter comes from the energetic participation of young people all over the world around the UNCED process (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development). From the second Preparatory Committee Meeting in 1991 to the actual conference in Rio in June 1992, youths were actively organizing and consolidating their ideas around Environment and Development issues. Numerous preparatory processes were organized, leading to an unprecedented awareness among young people of these issues and an eagerness to influence a process which could be crucial in shaping the planet for the next generation.
The questions that were raised by youth after the UNCED process finished, lead to the bigger questions of youth strategies in the nineties, in particular youth involved in Environment and Development issues. In other words, what strategy should youth adopt in order to be a social force creating the world of the next generation?
This chapter tries to shed light on some of these issues. We start off with a look at youth and our characteristics. Second, we look at one perspective on global politics. The third part of the chapter is an analysis of youth participation at UNCED, in the Post-UNCED era. Finally, we present you with tools to become involved in global action: organizing stratagies, case studies on activism, electronic networking and resource materials.
"The answers are founded in the capacity to develop a critical consciousness and in the popular organizations, the answer is in summing up different efforts (...), in the joint action to promote the defense of life, in provoking changes and generating alternatives, assuming the challenge that the current situation of humankind is putting in front of us today. Is in this way that we can recuperate the golondrinas, the flowers with perfume, more just relationship between the South and the North, the East and the West and the South and the South. The utopias have to been lived to make them true, we need a doses of practical idealism and the spiritual force to confront, to share and transform a world that is , individualistic competitive and more complex everyday; to get to the point where the solidarity will be opening the door of hope to those in love with life"
Adolfo Prez Esquivel
Nobel Peace Prize, 1980
Cite as: Youth Sourcebook on Sustainable Development. Winnipeg: IISD, 1995. Online. Internet. http://iisd.ca/youth/ysbk078.htm.