An Overview of the Pact for the Future

In Our Common Agenda, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, stated ‘humanity faces a stark and urgent choice: a breakdown or a breakthrough’. Multiple crises such as growing inequalities, conflicts, climate change and biodiversity loss are posing severe threats to the world. This is the context in which the Summit of the Future: Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow will take place on 22-23 September 2024. The Summit aims to enhance cooperation on critical challenges and address gaps in global governance, reaffirm existing commitments – including to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the United Nations Charter – and move towards a reinvigorated multilateral system that can effectively tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow for the sake of humanity. An action-oriented outcome document, the Pact for the Future, is currently being negotiated by Member States through a detailed intergovernmental process. 

In realizing this future-oriented vision for all, the academic community has a key contribution to make, which is why the UNESCO Chairs, UNITWIN Networks, and other research partners came together for the first in a new online series of UNESCO Chairs Seminars to discuss the global issues addressed in the draft Pact for the Future. This series is held in parallel to the fast-evolving intergovernmental negotiation process with the aim of creating synergies in the run-up to the Summit of the Future and beyond. Active participation by UNESCO Chairs in the first seminar demonstrated their high level of interest in key issues for sustainable development. Sobhi Tawil, Director of UNESCO’s Future of Learning and Innovation Division, in opening the Seminar observed that “the collective intelligence and interdisciplinary expertise” of UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks constitute an invaluable contribution to UNESCO’s priorities, and the current concerns and discussions at the international level. 

In presenting key features of the draft Pact, Caroline Siebold, Executive Officer, Bureau of Strategic Planning at UNESCO, highlighted the objectives and main issues to be addressed at the Summit of the Future. The Summit is a chance to reinvest and recommit to a multilateral system that delivers for all, and to cooperate better to advance shared aspirations and goals, in particular the SDGs. She emphasized that this also meant leveraging the strengths and contributions of different stakeholders for a multilateral system that is more inclusive and effective, and that can address emerging and complex challenges. She further stressed that there was a spotlight on the importance of science, technology, innovation, and digital cooperation, and on the need to re-establish trust in science. 

The multilateral system, decision-makers, and policy-makers need more than ever to be able to rely on research insights, science and knowledge. It was, therefore, only fitting to organize this discussion with the network of UNESCO Chairs, whose work is to fulfil this ambition of bridging research and policy-making, as well as to educate the next generations of researchers. In Caroline Siebold’s overview of the various chapters of the draft Pact, she also highlighted areas in the text that need strengthening from the point of view of UNESCO’s mandate, including a more prominent positioning of education; the importance of fighting misinformation, disinformation and hate speech – including as a contribution to peace and security; the role of culture; the need for financing in these areas, and more. Many of these areas have been addressed in inputs by Member States for the second reading of the draft Pact.  

Whilst it was acknowledged that it is difficult to get everything into one document, and that the scope of the Pact for the Future aims to address policy gaps, sustainability is very explicit in the current text in the three dimensions advocates have been pushing: environmental, economic and social. Vernor Muñoz Villalobos, Head of Policy & Advocacy, Global Campaign for Education, also strongly underscored the need to see the Pact as a way of reinforcing human rights commitments. The Pact for the Future will require, he argued, effective monitoring and follow-up mechanisms, and the United Nations should call to account those who hinder the advancement of human rights. It is challenging to close the gap between rhetoric and practice, he stressed, saying “nothing hurts more than broken promises”. In the context of climate change, some speakers suggested that the Pact should specifically try to link human rights with environmental rights. 

Speakers also emphasized the role of civil society participation as essential, not only to bring the Pact for the Future to fruition, but for an inclusive and vibrant United Nations systems. Katrin Kohl of the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability, York University, Canada, underscored how academia can take up the role as an advisor to civil society to enable those who might feel that the UN is too detached from local realities. A Civil Society Conference will be organized in Nairobi, 9-10 May 2024 as part of the Summit of the Future process and the academic community could engage.

Two chapters of the zero draft directly deal with priorities for UNESCO: the chapter on science, technology, innovation and digital cooperation, and the chapter on youth and future generations. Whilst there is a reference to open science, it was felt in the discussion that more reference should be made to UNESCO's 2021 Recommendation on Open Science. A Global Digital Compact will be annexed to the text, which is a positive development as addressing digital divides that will have ripple effects across all other divides. Linkages with UNESCO's Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms and the 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence were highlighted. The draft chapter on youth and future generations builds on the 1997 UNESCO Declaration on Responsibilities towards Future Generations and is taking the important perspective on future generations further. Yet, it is necessary to move beyond standard models of youth engagement and recognize that youth voices are needed at all stages of the work of the multilateral system as change makers. Higher education institutions naturally play a vital role in this domain.

A key theme running through the discussion was the nature of knowledge and the need for the Pact for the Future to integrate knowledge from the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’ in a dynamic way. A unique feature of the UNESCO Chairs is their existing awareness of the need for anticipating and formulating new questions, creating new knowledge, revisiting what needs to be researched, how, and with whom they conduct the research, ultimately, informing new policymaking and connecting the policy-research, as well as policy-society nexus. Susan Osireditse Keitumetse of the UNESCO Chair on African Heritage Studies and Sustainable Development, University of Botswana, noted that the topic of co-creation of knowledge production also raises the issue of intellectual property rights, as knowledge from Africa, for example, is often misappropriated. Such issues will be addressed at a UNESCO Chairs and Partners Forum: Transforming Knowledge for Africa's Future in Addis Ababa, 25-27 September 2024.

The relative absence of education from the draft of the Pact was widely discussed. Education, and the right to education, is a key foundation for peace and security, as well as conflict prevention, championing peace and global citizenship. Furthermore, whilst science, technology and innovation are mentioned in the Pact, it is largely in the context of economic development, yet its role goes beyond the economic sphere. Building futures literacy, capacities, and skills competences to open up different futures was raised in the debate. Futures thinking was the main approach of the 2021 UNESCO publication Reimagining Our Futures Together: a new social contract for education. Looking beyond the Summit of the Future, education is set to be a key component of the UN Second World Summit for Social Development, to take place in 2025. 

There was also consensus that the roles of cultural heritage and creativity needed to feature strongly in the Pact as their roles in sustainable development have been underestimated. For example, culture fosters innovation within societies. Recent developments, such as the MONDIACULT Declaration and the Leaders’ Statement of the G20, which highlight the role of culture as a global public good and call for culture as a stand-alone goal in a future development agenda, should be referred to. 

A question at the heart of the Seminar – and for the whole of the seminar series – is the role of UNESCO Chairs in taking forward the ideas and principles of the emerging Pact for the Future, in their various programmes of work and research, as well as through the collective wisdom of the entire network. One of the key contributions of this unique network, created to foster intellectual solidarity, is that UNESCO Chairs are already aware of the need to create new future-oriented knowledge through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, including engagement with policy-makers, according to Charles Hopkins, of the UNESCO Chair in Reorienting Education towards Sustainability, York University, Canada. This responsibility to contribute to a research-policy nexus, is keenly felt by the network. UNESCO Chairs, by virtue of their location within higher education institutions and their linkages to UNESCO, are often trusted as neutral knowledge brokers. The international network of UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN Networks can leverage multiple knowledge and research systems, valuing diverse world views and co-creating knowledge. As a network, it can serve to overcome divides and contribute to evidence-informed understanding and intellectual cooperation, including on the key themes of the Pact for the Future.