An Open Letter to the OECD from the 2021 YDC OECD Delegation
By the 2021 Young Diplomats of Canada OECD Delegation
The Young Diplomats of Canada delegation attended the 2021 OECD Youth Week and 2021 OECD Forum. This open letter aims to present our feedback and to propose solutions.
The Importance of Meaningful Engagement
2021 witnessed the first fully-online OECD Youth Week. The event featured discussions on a range of thought-provoking topics about the future of work and the post-pandemic future with compelling youth and non-youth experts. This first edition overcame its share of challenges, including being held digitally during a pandemic. Yet, it also left something to be desired. In our opinion, the traditional approach of hosting a parallel youth conference did not sufficiently involve OECD Members’ youth delegations in a meaningful way. Likewise for the Ministerial Council Meeting held in October 2021. While we had two weeks of excellent knowledge shared at us, we were given no opportunity during the sessions to share our research or lived experience back.
We know that COVID-19 is not likely to disappear soon and the time is now to seize this opportunity to implement digital solutions that facilitate peer-to-peer learning as well as networking. We cannot ask young people to just sit tight and wait until we go back to the ‘new normal’ to start building this type of experience. The OECD is a perfect nexus to experiment with digital solutions; it convenes open pluralist countries with youth who are willing to work together to help solve some of the world’s toughest issues. Changing the approach would not only benefit youth in OECD countries, it would help introduce new audiences to the important work of the OECD and feed new perspectives back into the organization that are currently missing.
Before exploring our recommendations for how the OECD can improve conferences like these, we would like to acknowledge the importance of our carbon footprint since today's youth will face significant impacts from the growing climate crises in their lifetime. Just as the shift to working from home has reduced daily commuting, it has also reduced the need to travel for professional reasons. While we applaud any effort to reduce the carbon footprint of participants to international conferences – including not attending conferences in person, a chasm of connection cannot be what is left, with no proposed alternative put forth to replace the in-person experience.
Recommendations
Our solutions are twofold and centered around leveraging technological tools and creating opportunities for network building.
Leveraging technological tools
To improve how it engages with the public at Youth Week and the Ministerial Council Meeting, the OECD should leverage the technological tools of today’s hybrid work environment. As an organization whose members prioritize democracy and good governance, the OECD should use these tools to implement measures that allow for both healthy and essential democratic engagement with public institutions.
These tools could take a number of forms such as using a specialized conference platform, which allows participants to engage with one another and create customizable agendas complete with digital discussion rooms and panel forums. The OECD has used its own specialized platforms for conferences before, and replicating this experience for youth at Youth Week and a wide variety of stakeholders at the Ministerial Council Meeting is urgently necessary. In a nutshell, we need more than a livestream. Technology can allow officials from the OECD and its member governments to field questions from youth and engage on a number of issues in a more direct way. Moreover, it can allow youth delegations, such as ours, to have the opportunity to hold digital stakeholder meetings with leaders during the Forum week when we have specifically dedicated time to be present for meetings.
The OECD should aim for something that can mimic the in-person experience where formal sessions are supplemented by a re-creation of the side conversations of international conferences. Anyone who has attended conferences such as these knows that formal sessions, in their structured and agenda-laden format, do not allow for the conversations that build relationships and generate ideas that underpin progress on the issues we all care deeply about.
2. Creating opportunities for network building
Networking is a key component of success in today’s job market. Regardless of the field, we all have been fed this narrative time and time again in school, at home and in the workforce. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing or growing your network in the traditional way has almost had to stop altogether to respect public health. For folks north of 30, by virtue of being around longer, have stronger professional networks around them than those earlier in their career, or entering the labour market for the first time. This network strength age gap has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and we have not found a collective solution to address this problem.
Taking an intersectional look at this issue, it is even more important for groups traditionally underrepresented in decision-making spaces to have a strong network. Having people who understand the institutional barriers you face and who can provide you with the appropriate guidance can be the difference between being in the room where it happens or banging on the door from the outside.
Prioritizing Youth Voices
The OECD has the knowledge and resources to become a shining international example when it comes to youth engagement in multilateral spaces. We know that technology exists to enable this domain of leadership. However, technology alone is not the silver bullet. Even before the COVID-19 crises, international conferences have been out of reach for young people and their valuable contribution. Often, conferences will organize a shadow summit on the fringe of the ‘real’ summit exclusively for youth, with no real impact on actual negotiations. This is one way technological solutions and inconsequential youth summits are simply inadequate at operationalizing what young people deserve: an opportunity for decision-makers to listen to them and take action on what they hear.
What we need now is meaningful engagement, forums where young people are brought to the same tables as the decision-makers. We are just on the precipice of inheriting an earth in crises, all we are asking is: at least let us have a say in what is being foisted off to us.
Co-authored by Jillian LeBlanc, Sameer Esmail, Erin Knight, Jonathan Ferguson, Shivohum Nar, and Julie Segal.