Reflections on governance

Wednesday, 18 February 2026 | Issue 0015 | Pocono Pines

Picture the rooms where the world's decisions get made. We’ve seen a number of them in recent days: Davos. Dubai. Munich. But there are many more. The hearing chambers of national legislatures. The boardrooms of multinationals. The dinners where the venture capitalists of today meet the founders of tomorrow's unicorns. These rooms share a certain texture: mostly men, mostly white, mostly middle-aged or beyond, and mostly economically insulated from the consequences of whatever gets decided in them.

Notice who isn't there. Young women. Young people of colour. Young people from working-class families. Young people from the Global South. The people who will live longest with the outcomes of today's decisions are, by and large, absent from the making of them.

If you're one of those people, you may have asked yourself, somewhere between the notifications and the noise: Do the leaders of the world actually care about me?

They may not. But they should take notice. 

Demographers now speak openly of an "age of depopulation." Societies are ageing faster than they can replenish themselves, demographic declines that will take generations to reverse. The numbers are unambiguous. Whether or not young people are at the table today, they’re inheriting this world. With all of its problems, its debts, and its possibilities — spiritual and material. 

The question isn't whether youth will lead. It's whether anyone will have the wisdom to build the table with them before it's too late. 

What the consensus gets right 

Something remarkable has happened in the last several months.

Four institutions that might not otherwise agree on anything — the World Economic Forum (WEF), UNESCO, the Geneva Policy Outlook, and the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity — have all arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion: the world's systems for engaging young people in governance are, by and large, theatre.

UNESCO reports that while three in four countries now consult youth on education policy, this participation rarely translates into actual influence. The Geneva Policy Outlook found that more than 80 percent of young people describe their participation in international forums as tokenistic. Symbolic speaking slots, short consultations, no concrete outcomes, no follow-up. The WEF warns that sidelining youth voices widens the trust gap between institutions and the people they claim to serve. All four institutions agree: The world is good at inviting young people into the room. It’s considerably less good, however, at empowering them to make consequential decisions once they're in it.

This consensus is rare and citable, and it should be amplified.

But the reports also propose remedies. More seats at the table. Better visa policies. Youth quotas in legislatures. Funded travel to Geneva. Yet here is where the consensus quietly sidesteps the harder question. These are procedural fixes to a philosophical problem. They assume that the architecture of power and authority is fundamentally sound, and that what's needed is simply better access to it. What they don't ask is why tokenism persists in the first place.

The answer, I'd suggest, is that we’ve yet to redefine what power and authority actually mean. Governance, in most of the rooms we described, is still understood as a zero-sum contest. If youth gain ground, today's leaders feel they must concede it. They experience inclusion as loss rather than gain. This is why every generation of well-intentioned reform produces the same result: a slightly more diverse room, with the same unexamined definition of power and authority within it.

What would actually change things is not just broader access but a genuine, multigenerational approach to decision-making, one where different generations are not competing for a fixed share of authority but building something together that none of them could build alone. And alongside that, systems of consultation and reflection that view decisions and action as points on a path of learning.

The reports get the diagnosis right. The treatment they prescribe is necessary. But it remains insufficient.

The argument beneath the argument 

The four sources we've been drawing on agree on the diagnosis. Where they diverge is more interesting. It reveals why the diagnosis has been so difficult to treat.

Start with economics. The WEF frames youth participation primarily through entrepreneurship. Integrate young people into labour markets. Support private-sector pathways. Celebrate the founders of tomorrow's unicorns. It's an attractive framework, legible to the institutions with the most resources to act on it.

But it rests on an assumption worth examining. It assumes that the human being at the centre of economic life is fundamentally a utility-maximiser, someone whose rational self-interest, properly channelled, produces collective good. Yet the ISGP disputes this, arguing that centuries of development built on this model have failed to deliver the prosperity they promised, precisely because they left out something essential about who human beings actually are.

Walk with this for a moment, because it lands differently when you take it out of the seminar room.

There's a word circulating among young people right now: “maxxing.” Looks-maxxing. Career-maxxing. It’s all over social media, and it’s increasingly in the news. The systematic optimisation of the self for competitive advantage. It captures something real about the anxieties driving young people's choices today: what to study, whether they'll be chosen as a romantic partner, whether they'll find work that affords them a long and secure life. These are legitimate fears. And the utility-maximising framework doesn't just describe them. It amplifies them, offering optimisation as the only response or solution to scarcity and uncertainty.

The problem is what this does to us over time. Divorced from any larger sense of purpose, utility-maximising becomes a zero-sum game. It’s a competitive arena where your gain is my loss, where inclusion is experienced as concession, where governance becomes, as we described earlier, a contest rather than a commons. It robs us, to use a word that deserves more airtime, of our nobility. 

Martin Luther King Jr. described it with characteristic precision: We are "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." That isn’t a spiritual metaphor that requires religious belief to act on. It’s a description of reality, material and moral at once, that anyone who has lived in genuine community already knows to be true.

Which brings us to the question of what moral empowerment actually means, and whether it requires a shared faith tradition to pursue. We don't think it does. But we do think it requires something the technocratic consensus is reluctant to name. It demands a reckoning with the kind of human being we are designing our institutions for. If the answer is the utility-maximising individual, then the reforms proposed by the WEF, UNESCO, and Geneva will succeed only insofar as they include more young people in a competitive and combative arena that no longer reflects who we are or who we are capable of becoming.

This matters enormously for how we think about artificial intelligence. The AI conversation is moving fast. Credible estimates suggest that a significant percentage of white-collar work could be displaced within the next 12–18 months (Bloomberg). That is not an estimate to dismiss. Neither is it a foregone conclusion about what comes next. The question isn't only what AI will do to young people's futures. It's what kind of world young people will choose to build with and around AI, and on what philosophical foundations. Governance capacity, moral empowerment, and the alignment of technology with enduring human values are not afterthoughts to the AI conversation. They’re its most important chapters, and they’re the ones being written right now, largely without youth at the table.

Young people are not simply economic actors or civic participants or spiritual beings. They’re all of these at once: material and spiritual, individual and communal, rooted in place and connected across the planet. Attending to all of these dimensions simultaneously is not a question of balance, as if each dimension had its own allotted hour. It’s a question of integrity, the bringing together and the making whole, the coherence of a twin reality that has always been ours.

What governance asks of us — what it has always asked, at its best — is exactly that integrity. Not competition. Not optimisation. Not the managed inclusion of new voices in old contests. But the collective effort to make manifest, as individuals, as communities, and as institutions, the unity reflective of our reality and our inevitable maturity.

Where the work is actually happening 

If that sounds abstract, look closer. The argument we've been making isn't only a vision. It's a practice. And it's being practised right now, in places that rarely appear in the rooms we described at the start of this issue.

In Zonkizizwe, South Africa, a community of young people and their families has been building something together for nearly two decades through an after-school community centre, called Vumundzuku-bya Vana/Our Children's Future (VVOCF). They’re not waiting for a seat at the table in Geneva. They’re building the table themselves: gathering, consulting, acting, learning, reflecting, rebuilding after setbacks, and acting again. Young men are learning construction skills on Saturdays. A young artist named Snethemba has completed three songs. An arts development co-operative, called The Artists Bank, is preparing to welcome youth from Zonkizizwe to a storytelling workshop at the Windybrow Theatre in Johannesburg, to develop their powers of perception and expression, not just for the performing arts but in service of their moral empowerment.

These are not exceptional stories. They’re representative ones. Across the world, young people are doing what the institutions described in this newsletter say they want to do but can't quite manage. They’re engaging where they live. They’re contributing to the discourses of their communities. They’re building, in small and serious ways, more just, more cooperative, more coherent communities and institutions.

What makes this possible, where it works, is something the four sources we've drawn on rarely name directly: a different understanding of power and authority. Not power as a fixed resource to be competed for, but power as a capacity that grows when it is shared. Our own advisory board operates on this principle. Its members hold power and authority as a group, not as individuals. A single voice, however experienced, does not determine direction. Collective trusteeship, the commitment to decide together, reflect together, and be accountable together, is not a constraint on leadership. It is leadership, reconceived.

This is what we mean when we say governance must be reimagined, not just reformed.

And it raises a question for every young person reading this — every college student walking to class, every youth in a township finishing a song, every young woman figuring out whether governance has a place for her. The question is not whether you are already a leader by some conventional measure. The question is: To what extent are you building the capacities, in yourself and in others, that genuine governance requires?

“The capacity for self-expression. The capacity to listen. The capacity to draw out voices that have not historically been given space. The capacity to suspend your own preconceived judgments and consider new perspectives with an open mind. The capacity to see diversity as a source of richness. The capacity to apply systematic inquiry to complex issues and questions.” And perhaps most demanding of all, the capacity “to elevate a conversation to the level of moral principle,” and then be guided by that principle in how you act (Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity).

These are not soft skills. They are the hard work of an ever-advancing civilisation.

Closing reflection 

We opened this issue in the rooms where the world's decisions get made. We want to close somewhere else entirely.

Not in a chamber, a boardroom, or a summit hotel. But in the space between people: the WhatsApp thread connecting three time zones, the rehearsal room in Hillbrow, the Saturday morning where young men are learning to build something with their hands, the campus path where a student is working out what it means to contribute something real.

These aren’t isolated moments. They’re nodes in something larger, an emergent global network of young people who are, quietly and earnestly, building their capacities for more just, responsible, and effective forms of governance. They may not know each other yet. But they’re part of the same fabric.

You’re part of it too. 

We'll see you next Wednesday.

— The editors