Dear Excellencies,

Dear Distinguished Speakers and Guests,

Dear Friends,

First of all, I would like to thank IDRC and IISD for organizing this event for the opportunity to take part into this extremely timely and relevant discussion. IISD is one of the founding partners, together with UN Geneva, of the Beyond Lab, a design space for social innovation for long-term sustainability located in the Office of the Director-General at UN Geneva.

On February 2024, the Beyond Lab together with UNCTAD and Rethinking Economics International launched a joint call for essays aimed at young people, aged 30and under, inviting them to share their perspective on the values that should be emphasized in a framework moving beyond GDP. A total of 630 essays were submitted from 50 different countries, offering insights and perspectives on the values and principles that young people would like to see in a framework moving beyond GDP.

While shedding a light on the reprioritization of values such as intergenerational equity, freedom and social justice, environmental sustainability, one theme clearly emerged from the discussion: the need to start crafting a new story, a new narrative about what progress, success and happiness actually mean, to reimagine and redefine the pillars of our systems.

And what is this narrative? As social animals, we, humans, are defined and shaped by our relationship with others and with the environment around us. Thus, we must reject the cultural paradigm typical of the homo economicus defining well-being as purely individualistic, to move towards a more collective and relational one. We are singularities that exist and are defined by the relationship with the many. Acknowledging this will not only allow us to understand that societal progress is only achievable if shared, but also that a variety of futures given by the differences of our singularities is indeed unavoidable, legitimate, and ultimately possible.

While trying to squeeze such a variety of human singularities in a single dimension, GDP has failed to capture the complexity and potentiality of human beings, experiences and relationships with each other and the environment.

Throughout the competition and the dialogues that the Lab organized both in person at UN Geneva and virtually, participants highlighted how the above commitments and collective actions must be accompanied by three key aspects:

· Firstly, wider allocation of resources in educational architectures promoting such values, seeing capacity-building on the topic not as cost, but as a long-term investment.

· Secondly, collaboration with pre-existing multi-level institutions to integrate new measurements and criteria with current ones.

· Finally, inclusive intergenerational exchanges and negotiations, to fully understand and balance the needs of current generations without compromising the ones of those to come.

But why did we do this? Why did we decide to create such initiative? Whereas we recognize the necessity of creating new measures from a technical point of view, a second process must happen in parallel, a process that ensures society is ready to adopt and share them. In other words, how do we bring this conversation outside these rooms? How do we create a fertile ground and a shared sentiment of social ownership of these measurements? That is why we reached in particular to young people, for them to own this conversation now and in the future. The beauty of these essays was indeed to see how youth translates such complex concepts within their day to day life: one of the essay competition winners, for instance, produced an elaborated analysis of a complementary GDP measurement inspired from FIFA and NBA video games evaluation of each football player, which is based on 50 and more features combined!

To conclude, the aim of this initiative is to be eventually scaled up to reach more and more youth globally, but also to create inputs that can shape conversations like these and formal processes such as the beyond GDP expert group suggested by the newly adopted Pact for the Future.

Thank you.
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