On September 22^nd, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted the Pact for the Future, pledging to take 56 actions “to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations.” While the pact was negotiated and adopted by member states, civil society actively engaged in the process leading up to its adoption, including at the 2024 UN Civil Society Conference in Nairobi in May and the Summit of the Future Action Days in September.

As co-chair of the 2024 UN Civil Society Conference, Nudhara Yusuf was at the forefront of this engagement. As a Research Associate at the Stimson Center and Executive Coordinator of the Global Governance Innovation Network, she took part in the process leading up to the Summit of the Future and will be helping to ensure that member states follow through on their commitments.

In this interview, Nudhara discusses whether the Pact for the Future reflects the priorities of civil society and how to ensure the inclusion of civil society in the UN’s future work, particularly in emerging areas such as the governance of artificial intelligence.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You said earlier this month that if the Summit of the Future “comes close to the level of ambition it is striving for, it should have a huge influence on the general debate that follows.” Now that the summit has happened and the Pact for the Future has been adopted, in your view, did the pact come close to the level of ambition you were striving for?

I think the pact has given us a lot to work with, especially in the current geopolitical scenario. The pact negotiations hit quite a high level of discussion. We saw Russia propose an amendment at the last minute to significantly water down the pact, and we saw the Africa Group put forward a successful motion not to take action on that amendment. It was a huge show of support from the African region for the pact, which I think says a lot about the member states that care about this process—and Africa  is a big stakeholder in what happens next.

What happened with the summit was maybe not what we expected. There were moments quite close to the start of the summit where we were questioning if we were going to have a pact. Even if what we got was not necessarily what we expected in terms of the level of ambition, I think it’s given us enough to push forward. And it was mentioned in the general debate a couple times.

You recently said that you’ve seen a shift in the dynamics of negotiations at the UN around the Pact for the Future, with countries from the Global South taking a stand on issues that they prioritized. Now that the pact has been agreed, does it look to you like countries from the Global South were able to stand their ground, and have some of their top priorities reflected in the pact?

There were a lot of G77 priorities in the pact. Some things were diluted or taken out last-minute, but there was a version of the pact where at least 163 member states had agreed to so much that was put on the table by the middle-power countries. There was a moment in the summer where Singapore was leading a group of 53 middle-power states in negotiations.

What’s going to be important is whether or not those same member states continue to champion these issues and if all member states will follow through on their commitments. If it was just about getting their necessary text in the document, I don’t know how much that achieves.

You co-chaired the 2024 UN Civil Society Conference in Nairobi in May, which was an opportunity for civil society to share their priorities and make recommendations ahead of the Summit of the Future. How much have you seen those recommendations reflected in the pact?

There are some things that stuck. The Declaration on Future Generations didn’t remove text on the special envoy for future generations despite very tense negotiations about whether it should stay. There was a huge rallying cry from civil society pushing for an institutional anchor for this declaration, because in 1997 there was a UNESCO declaration on future generations that has kind of been lost to the halls of the UN. So that remaining in there is one good example. There have been dilutions of some civil society proposals, like discussions on civic space, SDG16+ proposals, impact coalitions on financing for development, and certain inclusions in the Global Digital Compact, but I think we see the essence of those ideas in there.

What we’ve essentially created is lots of hooks on the wall, and civil society can now go back and start to hang coats on them. While the text is not quite what we wanted, it might allow champion member states, stakeholders, and civil society organizations to help member states to unpack and interpret the language in ways that continue to generate impact.

Not all of the impact coalitions created at the Nairobi conference are likely to be working for many years ahead, but I think that there’s at least a couple that are looking at clear hooks: the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Spain, the AI Action Summit in France, the Hamburg Sustainability Conference, the COPs, and more.

Are there any lessons you would take away from the Nairobi conference to apply to future civil society conferences to maximize their impact?

Nairobi was the first conference that took place in the Global South, the first conference directly attached to an intergovernmental process in the title (in support of the Summit of the Future), and the first conference to be given a nine-week timeline to be planned.

We were working on a very short timeline to not only plan it but also to innovate the conference itself. When my co-chair Carole Osero-Ageng’o and I sat down, we told ourselves that if we were going to make people show up to Nairobi, it had to be different than what they could do in their homes. If we are expecting the UN to do things differently, we can’t, as civil society, not be willing to innovate as well—whether it be providing a summary of the dialogue within impact coalitions instead of having a final negotiated outcome text or massively opening the space for member states. Previous conferences saw close to 25 or 30 member-state representatives. At Nairobi, we had 317. UN entities were present in full force as well. They were co-convening workshops with stakeholder groups and discussing shared steps forward. Seventy percent of participants were from African regions, whose voices we hadn’t usually heard in this space.

All these new opportunities and lessons learned came without any precedents. But I think that’s the place the UN is in as well. We’re facing new challenges, having to work in different ways, and exploring different forms of multilateralism and governance. I think trying to work in this level of uncertainty is something we’ve got to get used to.

We’re speaking shortly after the launch of a new report you co-authored on the innovation imperative and technology governance. One of the suggestions in this report is to decolonize tech governance. Could you talk about what a decolonized approach to tech governance looks like?

It’s worth taking a step back to ask why we need to decolonize tech. Artificial intelligence has a few traits that make it a unique accelerator of either harm or progress. First, very few people make the decisions about what AI is and how it operates, and very many people receive those consequences.

Second, because AI doesn’t make decisions on its own about its predictability, control, and ethical repercussions, you need people built into the system. When you combine that with the fact that it is very few people who have the opportunity to be in that system, you have an extremely narrow concentration of power with vast consequences.

Third, AI reinforces everything we already have in the world—and this includes inequality, lack of diversity, and systems of power. When we say “decolonizing AI,” what we mean is that we need to think intentionally about the consequences of amplifying the current systems that were built on unequal platforms, unequal structures, and unequal history. We must be intentionally analyzing the evolution of harms and rights in an AI system. We can’t go in at one point in time and govern it; we must instead think about how the system is evolving. That’s the whole point of generative AI: it evolves, so the harms and rights evolve as well.

In the report, you lay out core principles on governing tech for development and for peace and security. I wanted to focus on one of those principles, inclusion, which is related to what you were just talking about. One of the proposals you make in the report is for an International Artificial Intelligence Agency. It doesn’t seem like that made it into the Global Digital Compact, but there are several other new mechanisms proposed in the compact. How can we ensure that these new governance mechanisms for AI are truly inclusive, not just of the tech industry but also of civil society?

There has been some good thinking from the UN tech envoy’s office and others on this in establishing a multi-stakeholder high-level advisory board on AI. The difficulty we sometimes face is that AI is an esoteric space that is fairly complex to govern. It’s important to identify the people who are thinking about its governance and put them in a room with the people who have been pushing its boundaries.

The proposal that we put on the table for an International Artificial Intelligence Agency emphasizes the need to manage inclusion and representation with the speed and agility required for AI governance. This is where being more innovative about our models of governance is going to be important. It’s not just about establishing a board, a body, or a panel; we have to create something far more flexible that works like a panel along with something that works like a community of practice, combined with the more agile governance model of something similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Our proposal for this agency is to avoid making the same mistakes we made with, for example, the Security Council, which lets a few people come together and make a lot of important decisions. Representation at a new frontier of governance is important. Equally, we need to manage speed, agility, and bringing together those who are thinking about impact and consequences. This will look like a lot of different governance models working together. Naturally, we’re going to see a regime complex around AI form, and to ensure representativeness and inclusivity, it’s very important to have the UN at the center of that regime complex.

One of the goals of the Summit of the Future is to rebuild trust in the multilateral system, not just among member states, but also among people, including young people, many of whom feel disengaged from the UN. The Pact for the Future includes several recommendations focused on youth, and even before this, the UN has already been taking action to try to better engage youth, such as the new UN Youth Office. Do you think these recent initiatives offer a path for the UN to genuinely engage with youth and build trust with them?

I was having a conversation with a couple graduate students before the summit, and I was talking about how young people are key to it. It’s about what comes next in global leadership. One of them stood up and said, “Why should I care about the United Nations when all I’ve seen is places in which it’s failed?” Young people today are concerned about that, whether you take Gaza, Ukraine, South Sudan, the pandemic, or other places where the UN hasn’t been able to step in.

This is a core reason for the lack of trust in the United Nations. But the UN is a system whose successes are measured based on its ability to prevent things. So you see the pandemic that occurred, but you don’t see the six that didn’t. You see the war that occurred, but you don’t see the twelve that didn’t. It is difficult to measure the success of the United Nations, so it is difficult to build trust in it.

It’s important to communicate to young people that the UN works—it’s just not perfect. There are flaws that we need to address. It needs to be supported, handheld, and pushed forward. That’s why the Summit of the Future is so important.

In terms of what the UN has been doing for youth engagement, having the transition from a youth envoy to the UN Youth Office in 2022 has been a key part of Our Common Agenda and, therefore, the Summit of the Future. It means there is intergovernmental recognition of the role of young people in the UN, which used to only occur in resolutions. It means that rather than having to rely solely on extrabudgetary fundraising, the UN Youth Office has some central funding so it can at least function at a minimal level. It is also mandated with the coordination of young people throughout the system. This is something that member states can then be held accountable to. I think there is a real realization that we should not just include young people for the sake of including them, but do it because young people bring something quite important to the table in terms of a new understanding of leadership.