Description
In 2015, the United Nations Security Council formalised the global Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda through Resolution 2250 (followed by Resolutions 2419 (2018) and 2535 (2020)). The YPS agenda has, for the first time, formally recognised the positive role of youth in conflict transformation and peacebuilding. As it has been increasingly adopted by institutions globally, there have been growing calls to establish indicators to monitor and evaluate the success of YPS initiatives that have proliferated throughout the world. However, such efforts have been patchy, and despite the principles of the agenda, often do not involve youth themselves.
In this context, this paper presents findings from a project that sought to examine how power holders and youth peace actors propose to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the YPS agenda across diverse conflict-affected and post-conflict areas. In it we present youth-developed indicators that emerged from a survey, focus groups and a collaborative mapping activity, and put them in critical comparison with indicators proposed by institutional actors. This paper demonstrates the dissonances between aims of local peace actors and institutional objectives, the complexities of meaningful monitoring of peacebuilding agendas, and the potential for youth-led interventions to evaluation and progress.
