Youth Goals? Youth Agency and the Sustainable Development Goals

Youth participated to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)’ negotiations as an official United Nations constituency. And yet, we have so far no study of their participation in the SDGs’ negotiations. This is even more surprising that youth now rise, through protests such as the Fridays for Future movement, as key players of environmental governance, challenging both the content of policies and the very format of the political game. In order to improve knowledge on youth as international actors, this paper embraces a ‘youth agency’ perspective, opening the black box of ‘youth’ as an international actor, identifying youth representation formats, their positions and their impact. Applied to the SDGs’ negotiations, the youth agency perspective highlights the diversity of youth actors, their specific claims for planetary integrity, and the limits of their impact on formal negotiation processes.