Walk through the events surrounding the UN General Assembly and young people are increasingly hard to miss.
They speak on panels, join consultations and participate in youth dialogues. During UNGA81, young people developed recommendations for the next UN Secretary-General, a new global youth network was launched, and the President of the General Assembly called for a shift from consulting young people to involving them in designing policy.
But visibility raises a harder question: how much influence do young people actually have over the decisions being discussed?
Being invited into a room is not the same as helping decide what happens inside it. This year's UNGA offers some useful examples of how youth participation may be changing, and how far it still has to go.
Trying to influence expectations for the next UN leader
One experiment began months before world leaders arrived in New York.
Through the HER TURN initiative, 40 students from around the world worked with GWL Voices and the Geneva Graduate Institute to develop a ten-point Decalogue for the next UN Secretary-General. Through discussions on human rights, multilateralism and global governance, they identified principles and priorities they wanted future UN leadership to consider.
One of the participants, Vayunamu Bawa, described how her group struggled even to agree on the biggest global threat by 2035, debating climate change and global inequality before recognising how closely the two are connected. She later reflected that the process had given her a clearer sense of what she wanted to see from reform of global institutions.
During UNGA81, the initiative continued through a HER TURN Leadership Lab, where students and senior international leaders worked on turning principles from the Decalogue into practical recommendations for the next Secretary-General.
The students do not formally choose who leads the UN. Under the UN Charter, the Secretary-General is appointed by the General Assembly following a recommendation from the Security Council.
What HER TURN offers instead is an example of young people trying to influence the expectations surrounding an important global leadership decision, rather than simply being invited to discuss issues labelled as "youth issues".
From youth events to something more permanent
Another development during UNGA81 was more institutional.
On 22 September, the UN Youth Office and Mohammed Bin Salman Foundation Misk launched the Global Network for Youth at UN Headquarters. It begins with 12 international organisations and aims to create more structured pathways for young people to participate in global policy, leadership and decision-making.
The ambition is significant, but the network is too new to judge its impact.
The more useful questions will be whether it reaches young people beyond those already connected to international organisations, whether participants can help shape what gets discussed, and whether local concerns can find a route into global policy conversations.
Access itself remains uneven. Members of the UN Youth Office's Youth Reference Group have described visa restrictions, conflict, inequality and other barriers that prevent many young people, particularly from the Global South, from reaching global meetings.
Creating more participation therefore involves more than opening another conference room. It also means asking who can realistically enter it.
What does meaningful participation actually mean?
The UN has been trying to define this more clearly.
Its Core Principles for Meaningful Youth Participation, launched in March 2026, acknowledge that youth involvement in international processes can remain limited or symbolic. They call for young people to be involved in agenda-setting, decision-making, implementation and review.
The UN Youth Office goes further by describing meaningful participation as a process in which young people are treated as partners from design and planning through implementation, monitoring and evaluation, with feedback on how their contributions were used.
During UNGA81, General Assembly President Khalilur Rahman captured the idea in simpler terms, saying young people should move "from being consulted to co-designing policy."
That suggests a useful way of looking at youth participation:
Being present → Being consulted → Helping set the agenda → Co-designing → Participating in decisions → Seeing what happens afterwards
Many programmes may achieve the first or second stage. Moving further along that chain is much harder.
What does co-design look like?
There are already some examples.
At the 2026 ECOSOC Youth Forum, members of the UN Youth Office's Youth Reference Group helped co-design the agenda for a ministerial discussion, define its core themes and facilitate the dialogue.
The difference may sound procedural, but it changes when participation begins. Instead of institutions deciding everything first and asking young people to react afterwards, young participants are involved while the conversation itself is being designed.
The Youth Reference Group is also intended to advise on the UN Youth Office's strategic direction and initiatives, rather than functioning only as an event-based consultation group.
These mechanisms are still relatively new, and their existence does not prove that decision-making power across the UN has fundamentally shifted. The UN Youth Office itself says progress remains uneven, while young contributors to its 2026 Youth2030 reflections argue that presence and consultation still need to translate into real influence.
Five questions worth asking
For young people, there is a practical lesson here. The next time you see an invitation to a summit, advisory board or consultation, ask:
Were young people involved before the agenda was decided?
Can participants shape priorities, or only comment on them?
Who ultimately makes the decision?
Will participants find out what happened to their recommendations?
Does the relationship continue after the event?
Not every process can give participants equal decision-making power, but these questions can help distinguish between different levels of participation.
Beyond a seat at the table
UNGA81 suggests that the conversation is shifting. Young people are developing recommendations around global leadership, helping design some UN discussions and joining new structures intended to create more sustained participation.
The harder test comes next.
The number of young speakers at international conferences tells us something about visibility. A stronger measure of progress will be whether young people can point to priorities, programmes or decisions that changed because they helped shape them.
Instead of asking only how many young people were invited to the table, it may be more useful to ask what they were able to influence once they got there.
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