Why this session matters to us
Almost every country that reviews its progress on the 2030 Agenda says something about young people. The question SDGCounting cares about is narrower and harder: does that appear as a sentence of goodwill, or as something an institution is actually measured against? This side event was the clearest attempt we have seen at HLPF to move youth participation from the first category to the second, and it came with an unusually candid diagnosis of how little has moved so far.
The occasion was Italy launching its first Youth Voluntary Review, a companion to the Voluntary National Review it had presented the day before. Around it, three other governments and the European Youth Forum described the instruments they are building to make youth input countable, reviewable, and, they hope, binding. The honesty was in naming why those instruments exist: because the current arrangement does not work.
A paragraph, not a pillar
The sharpest framing of the problem came from the UN Youth Office. Its Chief of Staff made the point in the language of measurement: look across the more than 190 Voluntary National Reviews presented to the Forum over the years, and youth participation shows up in most of them as a single paragraph rather than a pillar, a marginal mention rather than a load-bearing part of how the review was built. Italy’s decision to produce a dedicated youth review alongside its national one, he argued, is not a symbolic gesture but a governance choice, and one he hoped other countries would copy.
His reasoning was about accountability, not sentiment: the generation that will live longest with the consequences of a policy is the one with the least structured say over it, and a review that cannot show it heard them is a review with a hole in it. That is the case for treating youth engagement as something to be measured rather than asserted.
Four instruments for making youth countable
What lifted this above the usual youth-participation panel was that speakers arrived with actual mechanisms, not aspirations. Four are worth recording.
The Youth Voluntary Review. Italy framed its review not as a document but as a method. Under-Secretary Barbaro presented it as an integral part of the national review process and a permanent feed into Italy’s national sustainable development strategy, built through consultations, school workshops and an under-35 working group. A youth delegate who worked on it drew the line the session kept returning to:
The youth chapter. Ireland’s UN Youth Delegate described the model Ireland pioneered: a standalone chapter in the national review, drafted and written by young people themselves. Ireland was the first country to include such a youth-authored chapter, in its 2023 review, and the delegate’s advice to others was procedural and specific: bring youth in at the drafting stage, not the sign-off; fund it and give it administrative support; consult young people from rural, migrant and under-represented backgrounds, not just those already in the room; and, the point closest to our work, collect age-disaggregated data so the chapter rests on evidence rather than anecdote.
The youth-written section. Norway, presenting its own review the same afternoon at the 11th meeting, described a children-and-youth council that wrote its own section of the national review, naming national priorities and where the government is falling short. Norway’s state secretary and its UN youth delegate both stressed that the delegate sits on official delegations as a member, not a guest, and had helped negotiate ministerial declarations. Their candid example was environmental: after young people used petitions, protest and a fjord concert to force attention onto waste being dumped in Norwegian fjords, the pressure fed into a tightening of the rules. It was offered as proof that participation only counts when it changes an outcome.
The Youth Progress Index. The European Youth Forum’s Vice-President set out two tools it has built. The first is a Youth Test: an ex-ante check run on a proposed law before it is adopted, modelled explicitly on an environmental impact assessment, with pillars for screening relevance, consulting youth organisations, assessing long-term effects, requiring mitigation of harms, and publishing the result in a form young people can read. The second is a Youth Progress Index, a beyond-GDP measure of how young people are actually doing, covering more than a hundred countries, that asks whether the young have access to housing, clean energy and opportunity rather than only whether the economy is growing. The logic she gave for it is the same one that underpins SDGCounting: a commitment you cannot measure is a commitment you cannot keep.
The warning: participation that stays symbolic is “youth washing”
The most pointed intervention was also the most quotable, because it was delivered in English. Presenting the results of the youth consultations behind Italy’s review, a youth delegate reported that the strongest message from participants was not a request but a red line.
That is the tension the whole session circled. A youth review, a youth chapter, a youth test and a youth index are all instruments for counting participation, and each is a real advance on a paragraph of goodwill. But an instrument that produces a report and binds no one is exactly what “youth washing” describes. The framing an Italian official used in a video shown to the room, that young people are “our implementation intelligence” and that the review “is not a dossier,” is the aspiration; whether any of these tools acquires legal teeth is the open question. Italy’s students, for their part, took the brief literally and came with concrete proposals, including a UN certification for “water-positive” AI to curb the water that data centres draw.
Our read
The instruments on display here are genuinely new, and the diagnosis behind them, that youth has been a paragraph rather than a pillar in more than 190 reviews, is the most useful thing the session offered. But note what stage the accountability chain has reached. The Youth Progress Index measures how young people fare; the youth chapter records what they said; the Youth Test proposes to check a law before it passes. Only the last of those is designed to bind, and it is the one still on the drawing board. Until a youth review changes a budget line or a youth test blocks a bill, the honest word for the rest is the one the delegates themselves reached for. Watch whether any government makes a youth chapter mandatory rather than optional, and whether the Youth Test is ever run on a real piece of legislation.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This lands on SDG 17 (follow-up and review, and the data that feeds it) and on the integrity of the Voluntary National Review as an instrument. It also touches SDG 16 (inclusive, participatory institutions) and SDG 10 (who gets left out of the count). The demand running through the session, for age-disaggregated data and youth-authored chapters, is a demand about who the SDG monitoring machinery is built to see. With four years left to 2030, whether youth participation becomes a measured, reviewable pillar or stays a line of goodwill will help decide whether the reviews describe the people who inherit the results.
Watch & read
- Powering Participation: Youth 2030 and the Pact in Action, the UN Youth Office’s own HLPF session launching the Youth 2030 Phase Two progress report, the companion youth event this week.
- Italy’s national review in context: the 9th meeting of VNR presentations (13 July) and Italy’s VNR document brief.
- Norway’s review, presented the same afternoon: the 11th meeting and Norway’s VNR document brief; Tonga’s VNR document brief.
- UN Youth Office and its Youth 2030 strategy; the European Youth Forum.
- Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
This session was conducted largely in Italian with live interpretation. Non-English interventions are summarised rather than quoted; quotations are English-language audio, lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speakers are cited by role or country where an individual could not be confirmed; the date is inferred from the programme and the speakers’ own references.