 Hello and welcome to International Ideas 25th Anniversary Conference and this webinar live-streamed from our beautiful headquarters in Stockholm. My name is Edina Trank. I am the Special Advisor to the Secretary General of International Idea. And I have the pleasure of guiding you through today's session, which, as you might know, is one of the 12 webinars we're holding within a 25-hour time frame to celebrate our anniversary. Whilst we want to acknowledge our achievements and take stock of the challenges at hand, we would like this particular webinar to have a forward-looking approach. This is why the focus of our discussions during the next couple of hours will be on the topic of sustainable democracy and the nexus between youth, democracy and climate change. We have a great programme ahead with enlightening speakers, interesting film clips and two thought-provoking panel discussions. Now, to kick off this event and to provide a brief introduction to International Idea and our 25th Anniversary, I would like to give the floor to our Secretary General, Dr. Kevin Casa-Samora, for a brief expose of International Idea's role and importance, past, present and future. Welcome, Secretary General. Thank you very much, Alina, and good afternoon to you all, honour guests, member state representatives, partners, colleagues and friends. I want to welcome you to International Idea's 25th Anniversary Global Conference. We are here today to celebrate the history of a project, but also to restate the endurance of an ideal and the relevance of a global cause. Yes, we are honouring the 25 years of International Idea, but most of all, we want to launch a conversation about the state and the future of democracy. This is what this conference is about, and we are going to explore the subject matter from a variety of perspectives. In the course of 25 hours, our teams around the world are hosting discussions that range from the future of elections in Asia and the Pacific, to the trends of participation in Africa, the challenges of democracy in Latin America and the case for democratic assistance in Central and Eastern Europe, among many topics. Here in Stockholm, we'll explore the sustainability of democracy, namely the links between the future of democracy, the expectations of young people and the climate crisis. I would like to thank our member states and all the speakers that have accepted our invitation to be part of this global conversation. Our gratitude goes first and foremost to Ms. Anne Lindey, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, our host country and current chair of International Ideas Council of Member States, whose opening remarks will be featured in all of our webinars today. And of course, I would also like to thank all of you that are following this event from different locations in the world. 25 years ago, 14 countries gathered in Stockholm and signed the founding declaration of International Idea. In 1995, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the first post-apartheid election in South Africa, and the spread of democracy all over Latin America were tangible signs that democracy was in the upswing, with an impulse that looked irresistible and irreversible. Against that background, the founders of International Idea understood a set of insights that have proved prescient. They understood that the prevailing optimism did not alter the fact that the progress of democracy was not secure. They understood that countries that had embraced the democratic creed had a collective responsibility to nurture it, protect it and advance it. They understood that the struggle to build democratic institutions did not have to be a solitary endeavor, that we could and should try to learn from each other. They understood that the lessons about this process, lessons about elections, about constitutions, about political participation, should be systematically distilled, compared, translated into policy suggestions and conveyed to decision makers, parties and civic activists in ways meant to enhance local ownership. The founders of International Idea understood that democratic institutions are rooted in social norms and historical developments that color their features and prospects. They understood that when working to advance democracy, the best approach was one that blends a strong anchoring on a core of irreducible values with pluralism about the way those values are translated into practices and institutions. Those insights have defined the mission of International Idea ever since. It is a mission that combines international solidarity and commitment to defend democracy with an understanding of the value of comparative and policy-relevant knowledge and a non-prescriptive approach, capable of defending principles while observing strict political impartiality wherever we operate. The achievements of our institute are rooted in its ability to remain true to that mission and those values. It is thus that International Idea has grown by now into a much larger community of democratic nations, which today encompasses 33 member states from almost every region in the world. It is thus that International Idea has played a decisive role in activating regional and global networks of electoral authorities, constitution-building practitioners, civic actors and academics. It is thus that International Idea, through publications, databases, events and a constant stream of advice to policymakers, has shaped global debates on issues ranging from the regulation of money in politics to the adoption of gender representation quotas among many. It is thus that we have supported dozens of processes of electoral, constitutional and political reform all over the world, where our comparative knowledge and our impartial advice has made a difference. It is a record that our member states, our donors and partners and the wonderfully talented staff that for a quarter of a century have given the best of their efforts to our institute can be proud of. And proud we are, but not satisfied. Because the world has changed dramatically and the challenges to democracy are greater today than they were in 1995. The optimism of a generation ago has given way to deep concerns about the future. Democracy was facing severe headwinds even before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. From our global state of democracy report, which we published last year, we can see that although the number of democracies kept increasing, the quality of democracy was decreasing across the board. In many democracies, checks and balances were becoming weaker. Civic spaces were shrinking and freedom of expression was under sustained assault. These challenges have been accentuated by the pandemic. Over the past few months, we have seen many cases where emergency powers have been invoked to do things that have nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with the intention of shutting down critical voices, limiting civic spaces and harassing minorities. Abuse of emergency powers is not the only political risk posed by this crisis. There is also the dislocation of electoral calendars and the problematic political consequences that stem from the economic devastation brought by this pandemic. If history offers us any guide, we are in for a period of great political uncertainty when disaffection with institutions and the appeal of extreme ideologies are likely to grow. If there is a moment to monitor the health of democratic systems, it is now. And this is precisely what international idea has been doing for the past few years through our global state of democracy report, which has become one of our signature knowledge products and a source for policymakers and activists, for domestic and international actors, to spot trends about democracy at the global, regional and national levels. This is why we have developed with support from the European Union a global monitor tracking continuously how COVID-19 related measures adopted by governments in 162 countries affect democracy and human rights. This is why we have mapped out in great detail the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on elections across the globe. Yet, the times call for more than quality research and data. They also demand that we organize and use our voice in defense of democracy. Hence, over the past months we have been active speaking out, forging partnerships and mobilizing the power of global action to protect democratic principles. Last June, working with our partners at the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States and many others, we launched a call to defend democracy. An open letter where we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic threatens the future of liberal democracy. The call enlisted the support of over 70 pro-democracy and pro-human rights organizations and more than 500 leaders, novel laureates, former heads of state, public intellectuals, journalists and activists from all over the world. Clearly, we are not the only ones concerned about the risks that this pandemic entails for democracy. If we care about the future of democracy, we have our job cut out for us. We must build the global coalitions needed to protect democracy in the face of unprecedented challenges. But we must also strive to reform it and revitalize it so that all citizens and particularly the young are willing to fight for it. This, my friends, is the task for the next 25 years of international idea. Now is the time to address the social, economic and political fault lines that were pulling many societies apart well before the pandemic struck. If they are to stave off the dangers of populism and authoritarianism, many democracies will have to return to the drawing board and renegotiate their social contract. We must help democracies activate wide-ranging processes of social and political dialogue that can lead to more inclusive societies, fairer economic structures and more democratic political systems. Now is the time to discuss how to enable democracy with the ability to effectively tackle intergenerational challenges, such as the dramatic transformations brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the sustainable development goals, and above all, the climate crisis. Now is the time to protect the ability of democracies to hold adequate elections, which are often the only safety valve for political systems subject to extraordinary levels of stress. But elections should be reimagined to adapt them to the societal, technological and political changes the world is undergoing. Now is the time to act against the spread of this information, which is rendering enviable the existence of a democratic police, where there is such a thing as the common interest and the truth means something. Above all, now is the time to recognize that we are in the middle of a long-term battle of narratives against authoritarian models and that we must be unapologetic in the defense of democratic values. Articulating a persuasive case for democracy is critical if we are to keep at bay the authoritarian temptations proliferating around the world. The good news is that the case for democracy remains strong. We must defend and advance democracy because to a greater degree than any other political system, it treats us as something more than underage creatures that need to be told what to do. In so doing, it respects our agency and inherent dignity. We must defend and advance democracy because to a much greater degree than any other system, it allows for the correction of policies. This is the result of the free circulation of information, the possibilities for collective action and of the transient nature of democratic political power. We must defend and advance democracy because as our global state of democracy report shows, it makes a difference for key tenets of development. It matters in particular for gender equality. When we classify the 162 countries covered by our report into democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian systems and examine the performance of each group when it comes to gender equality, that disparity is absolutely remarkable. Whereas only 3% of democracies do really poorly when it comes to gender. 10% of hybrid regimes and fully 50% of authoritarian systems do. This is important in its own right but also for its instrumental value. We know by now that sustainable development runs through gender equality. Therefore, if we stand any chance of achieving the 2030 agenda, we must protect democracy. Sustainable development requires sustainable democracy. Making sure that democracy can reform and revitalize itself so that the case for it remains true and persuasive is the cost that international idea pledges to take forward for the next 25 years. And we will do so by staying true to our original mission and guiding principles. We will do it by teasing out the lessons from democratic experience from all over the world and turning them into rigorous comparative policy-oriented knowledge products able to guide reform efforts and advance public debates. By leveraging that knowledge and putting it in the hands of leaders and activists so that they adapt it to the context and make it veral. By continuously monitoring the health of political systems and alert to both the dangers and opportunities for democratic endurance and renewal around the world. By accompanying democracy-building processes and lending our impartial and evidence-based advice to them. By building regional and global coalitions of practitioners, activists, and academics to enable mutual learning and cross-fertilization. By speaking out in defense of democratic values and building the partnerships needed to amplify the message. By insisting that democracy is a global, public good that calls for multilateral action. By working closely with our member states and our supporting partners to help them be more effective in their own endeavors to protect and advance democracy. This is our pledge to you. It is a pledge anchored in the conviction that democracy demands permanent dedication and that while the values we defend are eternal, our victories are always transitory. It is a pledge infused with the hope that the democratic aspiration is alive and unquenchable. With the hope that the sacrifices made by millions of women and men in the quest for democracy from Soweto to Santiago, from Prague to Jakarta, from Yangon to Hartoom, from Hong Kong to Minsk will have not been in vain. With the hope that their struggles are endowed with a transcendent meaning and the power to illuminate the future much more than the current clouds can ever darken it. Our collective responsibility is to ensure that the memory of those struggles to advance the democratic cause is honored and preserved for generations to come. That is the challenge of our time, and we at International IDEA intend to meet it in full. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Secretary General, for these truly inspirational remarks. As you have heard the Secretary General say, International IDEA is an intergovernmental organization with 33 member states from all over the world. This year, as the Institute turns 25, our host country and founding member Sweden has been chairing our Council of Member States. And we were very glad to receive this very strong message of support from the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ann Linde, in this following video. Five years ago, representatives of 14 countries met here in Stockholm for the first Council meeting of the newly founded International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA. Following the developments around 1990, countries needed an international forum to exchange and learn from others how to shape their form of democracy. Because democracy cannot be exported, it has to grow from within a society. But there are lessons to be learned, and experiences to be drawn, and the International IDEA was to be the place for countries to do just that. International IDEA has faced a chair of challenges, but is today steadily forging its role as a centre of excellence for the advancement of democracy worldwide as a universal human aspiration and an enabler of sustainable development through supporting the building, strengthening and safeguarding of democratic political institutions and processes, quoting from its mission statement. While the conviction that democracy was the way forward seemed to be uncontested in the 1990s, things have since changed. Democratic backsliding, challenges to human rights and the undermining of the rule of law are trends we have witnessed for several years. IDEA's Global State of Democracy report, a reference point when it comes to monitoring the development of democracy around the world, provides an invaluable evidence base in this regard. The most recent addition to IDEA's toolbox, the Global Monitor of COVID-19's impact on democracy and human rights, clearly shows how this negative global trend has been further accentuated the pandemic. Dear friends, we need to act against and formulate a counter narrative to these negative trends. We know that authoritarianism is not the answer to today's challenges. We are as convinced today as we were in 1995 that democracy is the best form of governance for stability and development, but we need to make the case again. Democracy provides political accountability and therefore a mechanism to correct mistakes and do better. Democracy ensures transparency and access to information, without which there can be no progress. While the fear of COVID-19 has understandably triggered dramatic measures, we need to remain vigilant. The current pandemic must not be allowed to become an excuse for governmental overreach to undermine democracy or its institutions. It takes times, sometimes generations, to build up stable and impartial democratic institutions, but they can be dismantled very quickly. Any limitations to the enjoyment of human rights must be in accordance with international law. The response to the pandemic must be based on gender equality, human rights, democracy and the rule of law, because only that can ensure the confidence and credibility in societies to make it sustainable. Democracy allows for civil society to mobilize, for inequalities to be confronted, for policy issues to be openly debated, for trustworthy information to freely flow and governments to be accountable to citizens. All essential tools for successfully dealing with the current public health, emergency and its consequences. Precisely for this purpose, the Swedish government last year initiated the Campaign Drive for Democracy. Through diplomatic activity and a series of events and democracy talks, it aims to promote and strengthen democracy and the aspects that in our view must be part of a sustainable democracy. Equality, participation, sustainable development, inclusive growth, governance, human rights and security. We have particularly focused on supporting civil society actors, human rights defenders and trade union leaders as their role is central to upholding democracy and holding governments to account. This includes strengthening free and independent media and the safety of journalists and media workers. But we must also build global coalitions. In connection with this year's virtual United Nations General Assembly high-level meeting, we launch, as a follow-up to our Drive for Democracy, a cross-regional partnership together with a core group of countries called the Friends in Defense of Democracy. With two exceptions, the countries in this partnership are also members of International IDEA and the IC IDEA and its Member State as a platform and partner in this continued struggle of narratives. Dear friends, SWIN is proud to be an initiator, founding member, host country and this year's Chair of the Council of Member States of International IDEA. And I want to congratulate its current Secretary-General, Mr. Casa Samora, and all its dedicated staff around the world on this special occasion. The current circumstances show the absolute necessity of multilateralism and the continued pursuit of rules-based international order. International IDEA will continue to be a central partner in this work and we look forward to the next 25 years of democracy promotion. Thank you very much Minister Linde and the Swedish government for your unwavering support to democracy and to international idea. And speaking of Sweden and democracy, this year Sweden is having its own important democracy jubilee. As the country celebrates 100 years ago since the introduction of universal and equal suffrage, this decision taken all these years ago by the Swedish parliament has marked the cause of democracy in Sweden ever since and has been firmly grounded in the notion that all public power proceeds from the people. To elaborate further on this and the importance of people actively engaging and participating in democracy, I now have the pleasure of introducing Mr. Andreas Nolen, the speaker of the Swedish parliament. Thank you. Dr. Casa Samora, ladies and gentlemen, democracy is an ongoing process, a task that can never be fulfilled. It is a never-ceasing endeavor for a better future. On behalf of the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, I would like to extend our congratulations on the 25th anniversary of International IDEA and to congratulate you on the excellent work you have done on the crucial subject of democracy. The state of democracy varies across the globe, but despite the differences, we still need to address common challenges together. We need to learn from each other's experiences. Thus, this webinar has an important role to play as it brings us together, supplying us with the crucial tools we need in our common effort to defend democracy at a time when it is facing challenges and threats and to develop. The theme of this speech is democracy and the people in the past, present and future. I will start off in the past, as was indicated in the introduction. The Riksdag is currently holding a four-year celebration of 100 years of Swedish democracy. In 1918, the first decision was taken in parliament to introduce universal and equal suffrage. The reform was carried out following a long struggle and intensive advocacy efforts, a decision that marked the dawn of democracy in our country. So I am proud today to have this opportunity to celebrate both our democratic anniversaries. In our parliament, we strongly believe that democracy is truly worth commemorating, celebrating and vitalizing, also at an international level. Therefore, before the COVID-19 pandemic, I brought parts of the centenary celebration with me on my travels by arranging seminars on democracy. During my official visits to Belgium and Slovenia, respectively, we had the honour of cooperating with the international idea at such seminars. It was of great value to be able to benefit from your knowledge and expertise on democracy. International idea was established at a hopeful time, as stated in the declaration of the founding conference. The world is entering into an age of democracy. Democratic values are becoming more and more widely accepted. Now the situation is more complex. There is clearly no lack of challenges at the present time. The individuals engaged in the struggle for democracy 100 years ago fought the challenges of their time. At that time, we found ourselves at a watershed in Sweden. Long and tough negotiations on universal and equal suffrage developed between politicians, organizations, business representatives and the king. Sweden was on the brink of taking a possible revolutionary path, or of peaceful reform, before events were to pave the way towards reform. Often, when reflecting upon historical events, we tend to take the outcome as given. But the breakthrough of democracy was never at any point during that process something that could be taken for granted, nor can democracy be taken for granted today. 100 years ago, men and women in Sweden were struggling to gain equal civil rights. Today, we face other questions, but the key issue remains the same. Who has the right to be heard or to exercise power? Another key issue is trust. 100 years ago, the establishment had to put its trust in the voters when giving them extended rights. Today, a major question in our democracies is whether the voters have or do not have trust in the establishment. Trust is truly a crucial component in society, and it grows when people see society functioning, when they feel that they are as individuals count, and when they have knowledge. As idea shows in its report The Global State of Democracy 2019, the advances and democratization of the last four decades risk being replaced by a backlash in democratic countries. Idea writes that democracy as an idea continues to mobilize, but that democracy in practice leaves many people disillusioned. And beyond the democracies, we see authoritarian regimes growing in strength and self-confidence. Here we have a pressing task and we need to deal with it together. We are currently in the midst of a pandemic which is reaping lives, destroying economies and reversing advances, conflicts and of course climate change are examples of other global challenges that require a joint approach. Furthermore, the fact that authoritarian regimes are on the rise and the number of democracies is decreasing constitutes a global threat that in the long term can harm human rights, peace and development, unless we are able to start a new wave of democratization across the globe and to turn the tide of the trend of authoritarianism. Your anniversary is an opportunity not only to remember what has been achieved in the past, but also to address the present situation and to find inspiration to take on the challenges of the future. The expression that each generation needs to be won over to the ideals of democracy is obviously very much still true and highly relevant today. In the democracies of the world, we need to ensure that democracy is more than just an abstract ideal. We need to ensure that it delivers substantial results. In the dictatorships of the world, we need to promote change. When talking about democracy in the future, I would like to mention climate change as a momentous issue. Young people of today are taking to the streets in an extent we have not experienced in a long time, giving voice to their concerns and demands. When meeting young people, I always say to them that they are needed in our society and in our democracy. They have to take part in public debate to vote and become engaged. As a politician, I also encourage them to take part not only in movements that address one issue, but in the political parties or their youth leagues, where they can learn to see the whole picture and to prioritize between several important issues. Whatever the form of engagement, engagement itself is a prerequisite for a sustainable and democratic future. People's engagement is the very core of democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, 100 years ago, women and men struggled for democracy in Sweden and succeeded. 25 years ago, the decision was made to establish international idea, a very foresighted decision of the founding members. I am proud that Sweden was one of them. Today, we look upon those victories, those achievements, and we take inspiration from the fact that they were possible. They made it. Now it is our turn to take on our democratic tasks. We will do this and we can succeed. It is our responsibility to develop the democracy we inherited and to pass it on to the next generation, a strong generation that gives me hope. Together, we will promote, strengthen and develop democracy globally. In Sweden, we have a saying, a friendly need is a friend indeed. This means that helping one another is more important than ever in times of trouble. And with the challenges we face today, when democracy is both under pressure and very much needed, I am glad that international idea is one of our friends. There are many struggles to address today. Yesterday, I had the honour of meeting the leader of the Belarus opposition in the Swedish parliament. We had a very inspirational conversation and I was very impressed by her strength and courage and resolve at this very difficult moment for the Belarusian people. There are many things that give me hope today, but there are also many threats and challenges. International idea has a crucial role to play now and in the years to come. Once again, congratulations and a heartfelt thank you from the Swedish parliament to all of you that form part of international idea. Thank you. Thank you so much, Honourable Speaker, for these truly inspirational remarks. We will remember your words for international ideas 100 year anniversary. Now that we all hopefully feel both enlightened about the past and cognizant of the present, I would like to start our discussions about the future of democracy and who is better to voice the ideas of how society's best should be transformed to remain open, democratic and inclusive than the youth of today. This is why we have invited a group of young, bright people affiliated with the newly founded International Youth Think Tank to share their thoughts about democracy in the form of a video that has been entirely conceptualised, directed, filmed and produced by them. Enjoy. The International Youth Think Tank is happy to join International Idea in its 25th anniversary to present our take on how the youth envisions the future of sustainable democracy. The people and their thoughts, ideas and morals are inevitably dynamic, constantly changing the way people live. In contrast, buildings are binary. You are inside or outside, people are inside and outside. The people and their ideas are dynamic, constantly changing the way people live. In contrast, buildings are binary. You are inside or outside, people are cold, privileged or forgotten. To defend democracy in an open society, we need strong, instead of institutions, so that we can re-evaluate our policy to reach people. Let the entire agency be a factor of unification between the two of us in our democracy. We must start with building a civil representative through the program of education in the city life and equal access to education. It is important to pay special attention to the possibilities for alternative methods of education and not the ones that lead us to recognize the diversity of the world. The key to the democratic elements of education and the long-term youth education for political representatives is the sustainable meaning of the foundations and the strong, independent civil society. In addition, citizens are involved in political deliberation through the construction of support structures, such as local assemblies, civic committees and consultation platforms. Online debates can, for the young people, in the decision-making areas and only a small part of the democratic process will increase the inclusion of those who are marginalized. Through the democratization of taxes, each citizen must be able to be economically responsible and choose at least one part of their own fiscal contribution. With current threats to democracy, we need to protect the agency that we build and enable. This means raising awareness around digital manipulation, polarization of discussions and foreign interference with political mechanisms. We need to protect the humans within our democracy by enforcing human rights, especially protecting minority groups and shifting to our being economics for us and our environment. The dignity of people should be a standard, not beholden to the moral whim of the privileged few. Protecting the agency fundamentally entails diversifying participation in democracy and voting mechanisms. Together, we are a democracy. What a wonderful, important message from the International Youth Think Tank, who will actually now be joining live from their own global conference, where 218 young people from 38 countries have come together to discuss and develop tangible solutions on how to sustain an open and democratic society. We now have two of their representatives. Juman Tafkniki and Sara Lövgren with us today to present some of their ideas, which will serve as food for thought for the subsequent panel discussion that we will have here in our program. Juman, Sara, are you with us? Yes, we're here. Great. Welcome. Thank you. Okay, so let's dive right in. So for society to really work with these challenges like COVID or the climate crisis, we first of all need strong supportive governance at the global level. The current pandemic has revealed inequalities and lack of cooperation that exists between UN members. That's why we propose UN 2.0, a concept of radical reforms for political institutions. The UN came to exist after the unspeakable crisis of the World War II. And to face contemporary crises, now it needs to push for a similar shift in the global society. We recommend the following changes. Real regional representation, meaning the inclusion of more Asian, African and Latin American countries into the Security Council. Real voting power, meaning the end of the veto. And real strengthening of international agreements, making them legally binding and enforceable. But to face these big challenges, citizens also need to have secure information and media. Now the status quo is in a truth crisis with unreliable facts spreading at a grand scale. So to secure free speech and trustworthy media, we call for the global charter for truth to regulate new media. This charter will include the truth check on news, making companies accountable for the content on their platforms. It calls for immunity for journalists and international support for journalists, creating a global support network for intergovernmental organizations for journalists and whistleblowers. And lastly, address the issue of data ownership. Free apps aren't actually free, but you pay with your data. The charter should find ways to increase transparency and regulate this. We want to stress the importance of education and the effect that it has on every democratic aspect of our lives. For an example of this, we would like to present this graph that namely demonstrates that people with higher education tend to vote both in EP and national elections to a way much higher than people with lower education degree. We want to acknowledge that it should not acquire a college degree to understand how we as citizens can influence our society, to empower people from all ages to build a European identity. We have formulated some recommendations. Our suggestion is to reshape the educational system as there are a lot of young people and adults who lack critical thinking and knowledge on the EU. We would like to include more interactive teaching methods that equips you not only to with the theoretical knowledge, but also to develop their soft skills. And by this we demonstrate the four C's namely critical thinking, communication, creativity and collaboration. These methods would be based on discussion, problem-based learning, independent research and would also include political workshops, especially before relevant political events. With this, we hope to equip every citizen with a toolkit that increase their knowledge, awareness and participation in political events and topics and lay the base for a long life learning. Another solution is the program Education Plus, which is the successor of Erasmus Plus and Erasmus Without Paper and provides students with opportunity for an international exchange in a digital. Students from diverse countries would discuss different topics during a time slot specifically designed for this. To facilitate the program, the exchange would take place at the school premises and would be equipped with necessary technology. Also, a special digital platform would be developed. The digital exchange could be completed by a physical one, which could be funded by the EU and would take place after both classes have built a connection over a long period of time. This initiative would be beneficial for diverse individuals to build European identity and feel included. Finally, we want to emphasize the relevance of our solutions once more by stating that education is not a privilege, it's a fundamental human right as find it by the EU charter for fundamental rights. Connecting to our educational suggestions, we believe that not only bridging the gap will empower people, but also encourage political participation. We know that there is a lack of empowerment for people from underrepresented groups, such as people from different ethnicities, religions, classes, sexual orientations, genders and abilities. It's not enough to say that you have a right to exist. There has to be clear interventions in your favor. On one hand, and because of that, we have developed a two-fold proposal. On one hand, we have developed a proposition for training for political participation. Yes, and through this training for political participation, it is an idea for a mentorship program that pairs local politicians with young persons from underrepresented backgrounds. In the long run, this would, from underrepresented backgrounds, and we think that the limited knowledge and capacity can be addressed through this. And on the long run, we see that this would improve political representation while having an immediate local impact. Our second proposition is a strategic program that targets high-ranking and powerful positions within the public sector. It aims to, on the first level, on a symbolic level, to combat self-censorship at the level of the recruitment by showing that at the very top, there are people from underrepresented groups that are leading that institution. And more pragmatically, this objectively improves the quality of the recruitment since folk would be able, from all the walks of life, to undergo less biases through recruitment processes. This will also compensate for the structural inequalities to show more diversity on a broad impact. Equality and, by extension, inequality are broad topics that underlie all of these proposals that we have so far presented. It's important to support left-behind communities, often existing as a result of intergenerational inequality. And to do that, we suggest three tangible proposals. We believe that we should use new measures to assess economic success. Taking inspiration from donut economics, we think that we should replace GDP growth as the main measure. Do instead measure the well-being of people as well as the planet and use indices that do that. We propose a universal base income to ensure that everyone nationally or ideally globally could have a minimum standard of living, ideally funded by a wealth tax. Third, we propose worker empowerment that could allow democratic practices within the workplace, allowing for better access to corporate decisions due to the influence of these organizations. We believe that this could lead to a holistic economic policy that highlights the shortfalls and that this could increase economic freedom and have a fair redistribution of wealth globally. So while some of our proposals in this presentation and the preliminary report that you can read on this link may be viewed as idealistic, we believe that it is rather optimistic realism, expanding the ideas and structures of today, with a factual basis as well as having greater ambition for what is possible. Thank you. Thank you so much, Juman and Sara, from the International Youth Think Tank. It was a really impressive presentation that, if I understand correctly, you just put together with your colleagues in a matter of, well, a few hours or maybe overnight, I don't know. Please stick around. In any case, your remarks and your suggestions made for the perfect introduction to our first panel discussion, which will be moderated by the director of our global program, Laura Thornton. And she's joined by three truly enlightening speakers, which all have a lot to say about the future of democracy and how it can be revitalized also by including young people. Laura, over to you. Thank you so much, Edina, for that warm welcome. I am really delighted to be here today. And I just really am very impressed, rather blown away by both the film and the presentations. I really want to thank the International Youth Think Tank for putting that together. And if you really did it so quickly, even more wow. And it really does serve to provide us some points for a discussion. So thank you for laying the groundwork and you've given us actually quite a lot to unpack. Thankfully, I'm not alone and I have an incredibly impressive panel today, representing a really diverse range of expertise and regional experience. Richard Young's, who is the senior fellow for Democracy Conflict and Governance Program at Carnegie Europe. Pia Mancini, who's a democracy activist, open source sustainer, co-founder and CEO at Open Collective, and the chair of Democracy Earth Foundation. And Katarzyna Gardup-Kadze, who's the first deputy director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. I think the best way, I hope to have a very free-flowing discussion. Again, a lot of issues were raised from the International Youth Think Tank. But I think first and foremost, I'd like each of you, if you would, just to tell me, what was one of the things that sort of struck you the most? And then we can move on to the various issues that were raised, and particularly looking, which I really appreciated at a solutions-focused approach. We have spent so much time in the democracy world of diagnosing the problems, and I'd really love this session to look forward and how we can come up with some innovative solutions. And I think the youth fellows did a brilliant job at starting that conversation. So why don't I start with Richard? Would you like to give your first reaction to this presentation? Thank you. My video is working for some reason. It is not working now, so I'll just plow ahead. So congratulations to the International Youth Think Tank. I thought both the video and presentation were fantastic, and show that young people are engaging with some really innovative new ideas in terms of how to make democracy more sustainable. I think their ideas resonate quite strongly with some of the innovations already unfolding in democracy. I like the focus on education and empowering political participation, and I like the theme of equal access to institutions. So if you ask me, Laura, for just one initial reaction, it would be on the theme of participation. So I think the presentation throws out some very interesting ideas of different forms of participation. For me, the challenge is how to get all those different forms of participation working smoothly together in order to make democracy more sustainable. So the presentation talks in particular about participation through the form of assemblies, citizens assemblies. We know these are spreading in significant number now around the world, particularly on the topic of climate. Yet we also saw in the video some of the climate protests taking place. Young people, we know, are disproportionately likely to engage in direct action for climate. So one challenge, it seems to me, is to debate the relationship between assemblies, very organized forms of democratic participation on the one hand, and more direct action on the other hand. We have had experiences, examples where these two different forms of democratic engagement can come into conflict with each other. And I think we need to think through how these different forms of participation, particularly in relation to the climate debate, can actually contribute together to improve the quality of democratic deliberation and reduce the risks of them undercutting each other. I have a lot more to say, but I just limit my first reaction to that. No, that's indeed a very important point. Thank you for sharing that. Maybe, Pia, you would like to give some first reflections. Yes, sure. That was great. Very inspiring. I'm very glad I got to see that. I guess, again, just one reaction of everything. It's hard to pin down, but I would say that the thing that struck me the most was this idea of not only building agency, but enabling agency, right? Because maybe we do want to participate and we do have the education or we do have the will. We do feel that empowerment, but if we do not have a support infrastructure, a space where we can affect that agency, how we can... spaces in which we can participate in a way that is meaningful to us, then I don't think we're going to be making a lot of progress. So kudos on kind of separating those two things and thinking about that, I think that is absolutely key. And the reason why I think it's so important also is because I think agency comes when there's a sense of ownership, right? When you feel that not only your voice is being heard, but you are an active participant of the decision-making process, right? And there was something at the end of the video that was mentioned about the diversifying participation, right? And I think that that, again, that it all ties together with enabling agency because participating in democracy is not voting, right? It's not just going and saying yay or nay to a system or a set of candidates or a set of political figures. It doesn't matter how well trained they are. We want to be part of deciding, participating, engaging with how those decisions are being made, how those politicians are decided. Why do we have the system that we have, right? And so diversifying participation and thinking about not only voting, you know, on a set of issues, but how we can engage in deciding which issues should be voting on. I think it's absolutely key. So again, I think we will the only way of learning how to do that, touching upon what Richard said about education. The only way we have of learning how to be responsible participant citizens is by doing it. We have to experiment what it means. We have to live through it. And for that, we need to be able to make mistakes. We need to be able to feel, to experience what it means to be responsible for decisions that affect others. And so thinking about enabling institutions or a framework that enables agency, I would encourage you to think about political or sandboxes of political innovation. What spaces can we carve out of our current political institutions that allow us to innovate to play around to figure out how we make these decisions and how we feel about making them and what we can learn about them. I couldn't agree more. I think particularly you see so often that the demand side is quite developed, but we're sort of pounding on the walls of the supply side, right? So how can we better infiltrate the decision making process? And that is where institutions will have to play a role. Katarzyna, do you have some initial thoughts about both the film and the presentation? I actually watched the film before it was even fully finalized and I was really impressed by how it was put together, not least because it appeals to emotions. And I think that is one thing that is very much missing in the mainstream political debate and one thing that can be a make or break and is too often abused. I will say a couple of things. One is that I actually do not think that we need to sustain democracy. I think we need to redefine democracy because sustaining means maintaining what is. And what we hear from you, from your presentation, from your film and from many others, what I hear from my children who are your age is that what is doesn't work. It doesn't bring the promise, it doesn't deliver on the critical issues that will affect your future, that will affect the future of all your peers. That for the first time ever is likely to put you in a situation worse than that of your parents and your grandparents. So if the institutions, especially the mainstream institutions don't deliver, then I think one of the focus areas for organizations like ours should be to focus less on populism as a threat and more on the ability of institutions to deliver about the founding principles of democracy, which is to represent the concerns of young people and all people and to deliver effective and timely solutions. And I think supporting moderate political powers to actually provide real solutions rather than window dressing, rebranding, which is what we often see, could perhaps change the tide a little bit. This goes also into engagement. There has been a very interesting study by Professor McNamara who studied how states budget dedicated to public communication is used. And he discovered that 80% of this budget is dedicated to top down speaking at people. Only 20% is dedicated to listening. And this study is from several years ago, but I think that is crucial. And actually he calls it the architecture of speaking. And then at the end he proposes the whole range of measures that could be done to develop architecture of listening. But there is already blueprint right there that I think that I think we could use. And one last thing I want to say is with regards to education. And that is that I think we have had this discussion two years ago, I think with several other colleagues in a similar setting, of course not as grandiose as 25th anniversary for which I want to congratulate you. That we have at some point kind of given up on informal educational channels. And because the formal education is so rigid and so slow in changing, then we miss an opportunity on teaching the 21st century skills and the 21st century leadership skills that are so much needed. And we still learn in schools at universities that a leader equals person in power rather than leadership is about ethical and being ethical and accountable, putting people first, being able and ready to serve for the common good and all the things that leadership encompasses. And this is where I think a reinvestment into non formal educational channels or extracurricular educational channels and working with school system to incorporate those leadership competencies into education more than what we now teach our children. When it comes to memorizing facts mostly and often inaccurate facts is what can what can make a difference. But the other thing I will say is that I do believe that it is it is critical that you demand change and you demand it now, because we don't have time for incremental changes. And that is the last thing I want to say. No, you, you provided a lot of food for thought there. I agree. Yeah, wholeheartedly about the reinvention as opposed to nipping on the edges of sort of little fixes here and there to Democrat to democracy. And I think coven has certainly brought that even more to light that the failure of democracy to deliver for people in a real way is been exposed. But I'd like to pick up on your last point and then pass this around again is, you know, these, this idea of informal education channels and I loved that the, that the youth group talked a lot about critical thinking and both in a sort of school setting through maybe civic education but also other ways to build, you know, these resilient, durable communities, right. And then that leads to the other point that I really, really struck me about this presentation and something I think a lot about, which is this whole thing of truth. And the role disinformation is, is weeping havoc on our democracy, when people can't even agree on what the facts are. So how do we build both resilient societies that are able to have agency and participate and also resistant to disinformation and manipulation. Yeah, why don't you take that one first. Sure. So, I wish I knew. All the answers, I'm sure. I don't, I don't. Okay, so. So on the truth issue. Something that struck like that came to mind when I saw the presentation and this idea of the of the truth charter. I think that part of the challenge that we have there. And it's the same challenge that we have with reimagining and reinventing our political institutions is that we are banging our heads with a status quo who doesn't want to change. Right, because power is conservative by nature. It wants to stay in power. It doesn't want to devolve power. So our challenge is how do we build alternative models that render these models obsolete. Right. What, what do we have as a generation to propose as an alternative way of organizing society and a public debate that it doesn't look like what we have today that clearly doesn't work. And I think that the only path towards that has to do with with governance again and ownership and participation. Right. I don't think it's. I think it's naive and I say this with all with respect and nothing but respect, but I think it's because it's the same. You know, I feel the same thing about me and the way I think about politics, but it's naive that we think that we're going to be able to change the way platforms operate today. We might be able to regulate them here and there. They're still going to find loopholes around that. But until we have an alternative until we are able to propose like what does a healthy public debate space look like. What does it make us feel? Like, how do we design it? For what do we optimize? Right. Unless we have that alternative and we're able to build that alternative outside of the existing institutions, it's going to be very hard for us to change the existing institutions. And I think that resilient societies are societies that are diversified are societies that experiment are societies that have different paths to do different things. And so I guess my my my only two cents and because I don't have any answers here is like unless we're able to articulate an alternative to the current systems. We're still going to be banging our heads against that door because they do not want to change. Right. No, I think that's a really good point. And I think we've all been guilty of looking too much at sort of regulatory frameworks to solve things. And when it comes to disinformation, like you said, it's like squeezing a water balloon. It's going to come out in some ways. So how do we build inoculate ourselves as diverse communities against against that? Richard, did you have anything you want to share on this subject? Yes, I agree. I think at the moment we had two separate debates. One is about disinformation and the other is about political participation. And somehow we need to join those two strands of debate together and be careful. We don't approach disinformation in a way that's too top down and actually ends up infringing the very participation that is the kind of root cause that drives the disinformation in the first place. So I think the civic education point you mentioned, Laura, is very important, but it seems to me that young people on the back of that need practical opportunities to actually get engaged in new forms of politics. And here I think the point that Pia made in her first presentation for me is the key way of framing it when she said that we need to find practical ways of innovation within existing institutions. Because it seems to me in the long term we must be heading towards a kind of fundamental reframing of what democracy means. In the short term we're stuck with these long standing traditional institutions and somehow we need to work around those. So it seems to me relating back to the ideas that I think Tang presented in relation to climate. There are lots of climate assemblies going on at the moment and they're generating really fantastic ideas. There's a problem in docking those assemblies on to representative institutions. So the French assembly is having a lot of problems in terms of its follow up now precisely because of this. So it seems to me somehow we need to innovate with these fundamentally new forms of democratic engagement, but somehow also build in the spirit of new forms of innovation into existing representative forms if we're to make a headway in the short term. And I know that's not ideal because it's new and old forms of democracy having to kind of coexist. But I just don't see the kind of alternative to that in the short term if we're to make democracy work for the climate agenda in a more productive way. Great. And it was also the point that Qatar's, you know, was also making in the sense of, you know, how do representative institutions incorporate these different voices and how we sort of balance those two things. Katia Zerina, did you have something to add on this sort of conversation that we're having about definitely disinformation but also public participation as of how they're linked and how that also needs to involve at some point inclusive institutions as well to realize that kind of change. I mean, on inclusive institutions, I think this should really be a fundamental focus and this should also go to institutions such as ours. And I was asking myself as I was listening now to Pia, how many times have we actually asked young people to write a project proposal that we could then implement with and for them. And I am not very proud of the answer to this question yet. So we have to do better here. But I also wanted to say, I mean, this will sound like a joke, but I think we should all be like Finland when it comes to disinformation. And this goes back to education and I cannot stress this enough critical thinking, analytical thinking and ability to distinguish good information from bad information. All of this in the Finnish educational system, children are taught from kindergarten, which is why Finland consistently for the past X years scores number one in resilience, societal resilience to fake news and disinformation. And yes, it is easier in Finland because the government is committed to it and the entire educational system is public. But it does not necessarily mean that these solutions cannot be implemented somewhere else. And I also think that we have to we have to be. I think one of the foundations that we focus a lot on institutions building as international organization organizations and and rightly so, but what we are missing is the other part of the of the story or we are not. Putting sufficient effort into this, which is the issue of trust, as was mentioned here before, and I think the issue of trust or a trust trusting in each other as a social capital model and healthy mistrust towards democratic institutions as in open and and transparent oversight while still trusting democratic processes to be good for us is something we should really pay more attention to. And perhaps it's like a little bit like with the COVID vaccine someone said, we might have the most beautiful vaccine but what if people don't want to be vaccinated. And it's the same story here we might have the most beautiful institutions but what if young people don't trust these institutions. Absolutely, or what if you don't trust an election result, even if it was carried out with good standards and stamps of approval. If you don't believe in the election process, then that's all that really matters, regardless of the quality. I want to circle back to the institution issue and because that was such a key component of the presentation, particularly this proposal about the event which I thought was very interesting, but some of the other gatekeepers or obstacles to more inclusive participation, for example, political parties, which have, by many critics opinion seems sort of stuck in another century, and really struggled to open their doors to youth. So the marginalized communities, women, minorities, LGBTQ, and there's this lack of interest at the same time of joining a party for valid reasons, yet they're the ones who are the gatekeepers to our governments and our representative bodies. So maybe I'll go right to you, Katuzina. What are some of your thoughts about, you know, how can we really think outside the box here about addressing these shortcomings in these gatekeepers of power? I think we are doing it. I think we should be perhaps doing more because one of the things we are doing, we are providing a lot of leadership training for political party activists. We are working a lot with them on ethical standards, ethical issues, codes of conduct, but I think perhaps one thing that goes back to what I started with is that there seems to be a certain disconnect between the mainstream, especially political forces and the citizens they're supposed to serve. A part of this disconnect, in my view, is that not only because they don't deliver, they might have the most dedicated, the most motivated, and the most fantastic people driven with the common good in mind, but they're unable to communicate this to the people in a way that people understand. And I think this inability to formulate what they have in mind and what they try to do in a language of values that people identify with and people that resonates with people then opens a big void to those who actually can use values-based communication to their advantage. And I think this has been discussed at length in several international organizations, but I think we are still at the moment when we are discussing rather than trying to put this into a good use with political parties. Another thing that I also heard is from you when you did your presentation, the issue of diversity and inclusion. Not as a token, but as a real meaningful respect for people with all their diverse views, diverse backgrounds, diverse knowledge, respect for people and being open to learning from them. This is one of the things that is really fundamental, and I don't think we have paid enough attention to. And it's actually interesting because I was thinking we have worked a lot, for example, on the engagement of people with disabilities in the political life, but it's a little bit like trying to teach a quantum physics theory sometimes to people who don't know the basics of physics. So perhaps we should go back to basics and teach and discuss more the very basic concept of what diversity and inclusion is before we start talking about specific groups. I think you're right too, and I've spent some guilty because I've spent over 20 years of my life training political parties, and I have to say that I haven't necessarily seen the improvements that we would like, so we need to think about these in different ways. And actually, Pia, I'd like you to weigh in because if I understand correctly, you set up your own political party in part because of a lack of opposing options and latest to engage. Yes. Yes, I did. I'm not sure I recommend it for everyone, but it was a joyride. So, I guess my view on this is that political parties served a really important purpose at a time where we were physically constrained to participate, right? We couldn't, our spaces for participation were physically constrained, right? And so it made a lot of sense that we would kind of hand over or give up our right to have more participation in terms of the feasibility of someone else making those decisions on our behalf because that's the only thing we could. And that was the best possible system we could come up with at the time, but technology change societies changed the entire world has changed dramatically. And we are still, we are still kind of outsourcing all our decision making into these political parties. And so we felt that that was very poor in terms of our ability to have input in the system. And so we wanted to figure out a better way of interacting with the political system. And so we created this political party that had a participatory democracy or decision making platform at its center where we would discuss and vote on legislation, right? On issues. Instead of voting for a political party for them, they have the mandate of deciding by themselves. We wanted to have access to us being able to make those decisions. And so it was a great experiment. And I think it's going back to what Richard was saying. It's a great way of carving out innovation spaces within the current political system. And it also, most importantly for me, it teaches us how to be responsible citizens because we do not know because we are so far away from the decision making. We're so far away from the consequences of our very, very limited decision making that we do not feel any ownership on it. And of course we don't. Like why would we, right? We vote once in Argentina, for example, we vote once every couple of years and, you know, bye-bye. And so why would we feel any responsibility for those that input, right? And so for me, it's crucial that we learn how to be participatory, like good participatory citizens and finding out spaces in those gatekeepers, kind of to hack them a little bit, right? We looked like a political party. We did everything that political party meant to do. We kind of smelled like a political party, sounded like a political party, but then our decision making process was radically different, right? And that was the way that we found in kind of creating this space. But yeah, the gatekeeper conversation, I think, is crucial. And if I look at the presentation, the idea of the UN to point out, oh, to me it sounded a little bit like, why? The UN is an organism made up of nations. Why can't we think about climate change from us as individuals, as peers, that we share a common planet, right? Because climate change is not a national issue. It's a planetary issue. So we need to figure out how we're going to build those jurisdictions, that level of the stack where we can all come together as citizens, as individuals, and make those decisions because they impact us all. The problem of thinking about this from basing these proposals on gatekeepers means that those who live in non-democratic governments, those who voices are mediated by non-democratic governments, do not have a voice, do not have access. And having a voice cannot be an accident of birth. It has to be our fundamental right because we participate, we're someone in this planet, right? So thinking outside of the box for me is thinking planetary. And I think climate change is the issue where we have to act as a common global, as a commons. Absolutely. We could go on forever, but apparently we're running out of time, but I would love to do this all day. But Richard, I would like to give you just sort of the last word to close out this panel and move on to actual panel on climate change as well. That's just before we wrap up, I mentioned two slightly counterintuitive points. I think we tend to think of young people being most disaffected with democratic processes. But in a way they are quite engaged and they generally have liberal democratic values and they're very engaged with the climate issue. In a way, the problem is the older generation who have the less liberal values who are a little bit disengaged and more skeptical in the climate agenda. So I think it seems to me we need good forms of participation and innovation that can entice younger people, but also older generations as well and get the two generations talking to each other. That's one issue. And then final thought is that we tend to think of the democracy agenda, the digital agenda and the climate agenda going hand in hand. Digitalization could itself raise some quite uncomfortable questions for climate. I mean, it will require access to minerals in a way that could impose additional costs on the environment. So it seems to me in the longer term there will be an interesting debate over the relationship between digital transformation and energy transformation. And that tension will affect the way we need to redesign democracy as well. Absolutely. I think you ended that quite well. We apologize to our youth group for not being able to go through everything, but you really got us thinking and I appreciate you launching this discussion for us. And I hope we can continue because these issues aren't going away anytime soon. And I really want to thank our panelists, Richard and Pia and Katarzyna for your important inputs and discussion today. So thanks a lot. And I will pass the floor back to Adina in our Stockholm office. Thank you everyone. Yes, thank you so much, Laura and the panelists. I fully agree with you. It has been truly interesting and thought-provoking discussions. And I'm actually very grateful for your comments because you've made my job much easier of sequencing to the next part of our program, which will be exactly on that topic, democracy and climate change. I think many of you are with me when I say that few issues are more important for the future of our democracies and of our planet than our ability to counteract climate change and build sustainable societies. So we believe that democracy has a crucial role to play in this and an international idea is fully committed to do its part. This is why we would like to launch at this conference a new work stream dedicated to democracy and climate change. And to initiate this discussion or actually continue the discussion, we have invited the Swedish political scientist, Daniel Lindvall, who has written a book entitled Heating Democracy in the Time of Climate Crisis, which unfortunately currently is only available in Swedish, but he has agreed to give us a brief expose of the interlinkages between climate change and democracy and by doing so set the stage for the upcoming panel discussion. Daniel, you're very welcome. The floor is yours. Thank you very much and thank you all for a very interesting discussion on the challenges of democracy and how we can develop democracy to be able to cope with the challenges of especially the climate crisis, which I would say is the most difficult crisis or the most difficult challenge that democracy have ever faced in the history at least of modern democracy. Well, in this book, we've been trying to analyze the connections between democracy and climate crisis. And why are we facing two crises at the same time? I mean, the crisis of democracy, which we are, which many have been talking about and the climate crisis, are they interlinked in some way? Well, the most obvious one is, of course, that if we fail to deal with climate crisis, the consequences will strike on our society and the foundations of democracy. I mean, the consequences such as food insecurity, financial instability, economic recessions, they are all aspects that are very detrimental to democratic development. However, what we are seeing right now is that we are entering into some uncharted territory. We will see our societies be put under a heavy stress and we can't really tell how humans will react if they will react with emotions of compassion or fear, anger or hate. And I think it's a matter of what kind of governing system we have, what the outcomes will be, if this system will be a system of a democratic system or a system that is authoritarian. So the major question, I think, that I would like to lead this discussion into is the question whether democracy can actually handle the crisis of the climate crisis. And I think we should be all quite frank. I mean, up to today, the climate issue has been one of the major failures of modern democracy. I mean, the climate issue has been, we've been knowing about this for more than three decades and the leaders of the modern world hasn't delivered. And this is, I think we need to be honest, partly because of the limits of democratic systems. I mean, a democracy is constrained by time and space. First of all, democratic elected leaders normally are focused to the issues within the national states. Elected leaders are often focused to please the voters in the present and not look to the demands or the needs of the future generations. And democracies are often led by emotions rather than facts and science, unfortunately. And worst of all, democracies are very sensible to interest groups, especially interest groups that have enriched themselves by petrol money. I mean, we can all be quite honestly speaking the climate denial movement, if we can call it like that, in the United States is probably the most effective and successful propaganda machinery we've seen in modern democracy and modern in in in present time. So all these aspects of course issues we need to to work on and to develop if democracy will be able to tackle should be able to tackle the climate crisis. But if we look at the research done on the success of democracies, handling with with the climate crisis, I think there is, there are several studies showing that democracies are at least better in tackling this issue than other forms of government. The most studies show that if you have fairly functional institutions, an open society respecting the rule of law, low level of corruption, those kinds of states normally present a better climate policy than states that don't. The only exceptions are states like, like Canada, US and Australia with highly influential fossil fuel companies, basically. But with this lesson, I think we understand that if you give if you have an open society where citizens can come together and distribute and access information related to climate science climate facts and come together and demand actions and whole governments accountable. Those kind of states will produce better climate solutions. But to end this this introductory note, I think there's a theoretical argument for democracies that make them superior than any other governing system. And that is that climate the climate issue is, in the end of the day, a very complex issue. The issue we need to that that necessitates measures and all level and aspects of society, we need to transform our energy system, the way we transport things, the way we the the the agricultural sector, the way we build houses. And there is actually not one single big solution to this. We do actually don't know the adequate answers to all the aspects of transformation of society. Therefore, we need a system that is learning, that is able to to feed in and process information on a wide scale. A system that can can try and assess the the the measures undertaken and and accept that some measures were not effective and do better. And I think these are qualities that only a democracy hold. And a democratic state like China will never be an enlightened despot because it doesn't have that sort of it doesn't have that system of processing information. And I think this is in conclusion. Why democracies are better? It's why democracy with all its shortcoming, slowness and messiness is necessary in tackling climate climate crisis. With this said, I would like to open a discussion with the other panelists. Thanks. Thank you very much, Daniel, for your excellent summary of your book. Now I would like to turn to a secretary general, Dr. Kevin Casasamora, who will be joined by an outstanding panel of climate change governance and security experts on the screen here behind me to discuss this matter further. So I will get out of the way. Thank you so much, Alina, and thank you very much, Daniel, for a fascinating introduction to which, to my surprise, is a rather under-researched and under-talked about subject matter, namely the interaction between democracy and climate change. With this introduction and this insights in mind, we will proceed to our panel discussion. And we are fortunate to have a truly outstanding panel with extraordinary knowledge and a diversity of perspectives relevant to this discussion. We have with us Cristiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and one of the architects of the Paris Agreement on Climate of 2015. And I should add with pride that Cristiana is a fellow Costa Rican and a bit of a national treasure for us Costa Ricans. We also have Dan Smith, who is the director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, CIPRI, a world-class research center on issues of peace, conflict, development, and global governance based in Stockholm. And finally, with us today is Professor Jojita Gupta, the current co-chair of the Earth Commission and Professor of Environment and Development in the Global South at the University of Amsterdam. Thank you all for being here today. We have a lot of ground to cover here because to the extent possible, I would like to explore this discussion from both ends of the connection between democracy and climate change. Namely from the perspective of the impact of climate change on democratic governance and then, and perhaps more importantly, from the angle of the ability of democracy to cope with the wickedly difficult challenges posed by the climate crisis. And I will ask the panel the impossible to give, to the extent that they can, snappy answers to rather complex questions so that we can have an interesting conversation for about 30 minutes and then open it up to questions from the audience. And on the first issue, on the impact of climate change on democratic governance, I would like to go to you, Dan. Let's see if Dan is with us. I think I'm here. There he is. There he is. Great to have you, Dan. And then you've done significant research on issues connecting the climate crisis, conflict, and governance. Can you please talk us through some of the consequences that the climate crisis is likely to have and is already having for the quality of democratic governance and the stability of democratic systems? Yes. I think it's important to start by laying one kind of potential bogey in the argument to rest. And that is that one doesn't talk anymore about climate change as being a sole cause of an armed conflict or a crisis. It's rather a contributory fact. And I think since your emphasis is quite rightly on governance, one of the things to say is that where the impact of the climate crisis is too great for the existing governance arrangements and governance relationships or the trust between the states and citizens, too great for them to work, then you get a more serious crisis, then that may lead into social and political instability. And then out of that, you might indeed also get violent conflict. So what we're very interested in doing is tracing on the one hand the features of the social, economic and political landscape, which make a society more prone to crisis and conflict. When faced with the impact of climate change. And secondly, to understanding what the causal pathways are so that one could start to recognize when countries or regions or a part of a country first start down the dangerous road towards instability and violent conflict. But as you say, this is not to be thought of as being a problem for the future. We're not talking here about or we're not only talking about the world that we leave for our grandchildren or that our children will be enjoying. We talk about the world as it is today during the past 10 years, we have seen the increasing pressure of climate change on political institutions in large parts of Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and also in Central America, especially in the dry corridor and the region where you come from, Kevin. And at the same time, one sees, for example, that where you have international peace operations that are trying to bring stability to conflict affected and war torn regions. Climate change is having an enormous impact on the ability of those peace operations to deliver what they should be delivering because they weaken the capacity of the political institutions. You asked for sort of crisp answers. So we're boiling this right down. Yes. The evidence is that climate change is currently contributing to the weakening of political institutions, especially where they start out less than optimal. Thank you, Dan. Now, and here I'm going to go back to one of the of the of the thoughts shared by by Daniel in his presentation. He talked about the fact that good democratic governance helps a lot in terms of dealing with with climate policy. The problem is, of course, that our own research done at IDEA shows that democratic governance is becoming a bit of a scarce feature of political systems across across the world. So given the complexity of the of the challenges posed by by climate change and the less than ideal conditions that many democracies find themselves in, the question arises whether those democratic systems can successfully deal with those challenges and remain fully democratic or whether they simply need a less deliberative and more centralized and plainly authoritarian decision making processes. Here I would like to quote a James Lovelock, the prominent scientist and founder of the Gaia theory. And here I quote, even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while. End of quote. What's your reaction to this, Dan? I think historically that's not true. I don't think that countries put democracy on hold as such. I think that they decide for periods that certain kinds of freedoms that up until then democracy had provided and which afterwards it could also provide certain kinds of freedoms needed to be restricted. For example, in the UK during the Second World War, if you were called up, you had you had to fight. You could be a conscientious subject, but it was quite a pressure to be so so you couldn't choose your own profession. Here's what I think about this. I think, first of all, move away for a second from the idea of formal democracy and look at what the conditions are that we can see where we've been able to research. For example, in areas in the Niger basin or further east in Africa in the Horn of Africa and other places as well, where we've been able to research successful examples of adapting to the pressures of climate change. And what we see every time that there is some kind of a success is that local participation is absolutely essential. If you don't engage the community in it, it doesn't work. Now, there are also, by the way, examples of failed efforts at adaptation, which included community level participation. So participation is not a sufficient condition, but it appears from our research to be a necessary condition for the success of climate change adaptation at local level. Then the second question to ask would be, well, what is the best form of participation? How do you get participation? And some form of democracy is probably the answer to that question. I think that generating a good and strong response to the enormous, and as has rightly been pointed out, very complex challenges of climate change. I think that a re-energized democracy at the formal level and informal level, at national level, at provincial, at community and village level, this is important. We can't do without it. If we try to do without participation, and if we try to do without a mechanism for participation, we're going to mess this up. That's very interesting, because the question of participation and legitimacy is very important. I mean, to the extent that we're talking about very substantial changes to the way people live, you need legitimacy for that kind of thing to happen. Now I'd like to go to Cristiana. As part of your role with the UN Convention on Climate Change, you had to deal with all sorts of political regimes, all of them. I'm intrigued with your experience. How do democracies do when it comes to climate policies when compared to other political arrangements? Can you discern some trends? Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for the invitation and lovely to see Joita again. I worked with her decades ago. I can't even imagine how many decades, so it's lovely to catch up. Kevin, I will come to your question, but I cannot resist the temptation to put my own little two cents into the discussion between Daniel and Dan. Daniel's conclusion that democracy is actually a better political system to tackle climate change is true, but it is true only as long as we reduce emissions at the scale and speed that would have us avoid the worst effects of climate change. Because as Dan has already warned us, we're already slipping down the slippery slope of getting into situations in which our livability, our inhabitability of certain areas of the world is so endangered that the political systems of those areas and the other areas where these people are going to be forcibly sent to migrate are actually in danger. So, you know, something that actually belongs very much in one with the other. The second point that I wanted to make. Sorry, I was just told that I was not on camera, so I apologize about that. The corollary to that, the corollary to that is again Dan's point about local participation. Curiously enough, we are at the point in which climate change cannot be exported. The responsibility to address climate change cannot be exported only to central governments or only to businesses. We have to democratize action on climate change, and it is only in as far as every single individual accepts our individual responsibility to reduce our emissions that we will actually collectively be able to address climate change. So two things that are very intricately intertwined with each other. Now, with respect to, you know, very irresponsible typification of what types of political systems do better or do worse. I actually resist that because it is a total simplification, but having said that, we could obviously say that those political systems that don't have electoral cycles do have the luxury and I put that into quotation marks. The luxury of being more long term thinking and planning, if they choose to, it's not necessarily that they do, but if they choose to. And so, of course, you could have a political system in this case, I'm thinking of China in which they do have a long term view, and we are incredibly lucky that China has understood that decarbonizing their economy is good for their economy. The fact is that it could cut either way. You could have an autocratic system that is not democratic that decides that democratizing their economy is not good for them, ala Russia. So it's not, you know, just because they're short term or long term, usually autocratic systems thinking more long term and and democratic or is to fit within electricals, electoral cycles. But it could cut either way the long term and the short term, it just depends on what the view is of how that country will be benefited. The other thing that differentiates of course democracies from non democracies is the impact of public incidents, and that again can cut either way. In Europe, it cuts for us for those that are concerned about climate change, because the electorate is so informed and so educated, and so it cuts for us public incidents cuts for us. But you can think of other countries that are also democracies in which the electorate is not as educated and therefore not putting pressure on their elected officials. So just because there's an impact of public incidents in democracies, it doesn't necessarily mean that that is a guarantee or in fact, even increase the ability of those systems to deal with climate change. The one thing that I have seen, and again, it is not, it is not a rule, but rather just an observation, is that democracies tend to over promise during the campaign and under deliver during administration. And that is not necessarily true of non-democratic systems. In fact, at least for China, and I'm not going to speak about all of the others, but at least for China on climate change specifically, I have seen them for 20 years, if not 25 years, under promise and over deliver on what they're going to do on climate change. So my conclusion is very difficult to say whether it's democracies or whether it's non-democracies that do better with climate change. I don't think it necessarily falls to the system of the political structure, but rather to the vision and the commitment of leadership at the time. Thank you, Cristiana. I mean, it's fascinating what you're saying. So I'll throw at you a slightly more difficult question, if anything. I mean, presumably, I know that you're very much committed to the idea of democracy. I mean, you're Costa Rica, after all, and by lineage and by choice, I'm pretty sure you think that democracies are desirable things. So that begs the question, what is it in your view that democracies should get right now if they want to be effective to tackle the climate crisis? Well, yeah, I'm definitely, most definitely committed to democracy, not only because I come from the wonderful Costa Rica, but because I am convinced that it is the only political structure that ultimately seeks the good for the larger number of citizens. So I am definitely committed to that. What I don't want to do here is to point or to build up a black and white scenario and have anyone assume that democracies do better with climate change and non-democracies do much worse. That is, you know, it's just too simplistic. There's too many shades of gray in between. So that is the point. Now, having said that, yes, our democracies need to do much better on climate change. And where I think that there is a huge weakness in democratic systems is their incapacity to deal with intergenerational issues with long term issues. There are admittedly 47 countries around the world that have some kind of an ombudsman or commissioner of children's rights if you want to see that as the institutionalization of the awareness of intergenerational issues. And there could be other, but that is the simplest one to see. The problem is that in those 47 countries, those ombudsmen or women or commissioners that are have the mandate to stand up for the rights of children are typically very, very underfunded. And typically, they do not have any high impact on policy. We also at a multilateral level, I'm sure everyone knows we have a UN convention on the rights of the child. Again, a very good convention, a very well texted convention, but not one that is adhered to in any compelling way. My point is that instituting in a democracy instituting either multilateral institution or a convention, or a national level institution such as ombudsmen or commissioners does not guarantee that we are actually moving toward intergenerational understanding, commitment and justice. Because it's not in our political culture. It's not in our social norms. That is the issue. The institutionalization can be a first step, but it is far from being the last step. Yes, institutionalizations can take us closer to this understanding of intergenerational justice intergenerational issues, but it is not until we actually adopted in our social norms in our political understanding and our political culture that we will see a change here. And luckily, we can say, well, in the meantime, we are decarbonizing, not at the rate and speed that we should, but we are definitely decarbonizing, not because of intergenerational justice, but because we are lucky enough that the imperative of intergenerational justice and the imperative of short term economics. What is the cheaper solution for energy? What is the cheaper solution for land? What is the cheaper solution for transport? Actually, those two imperatives are luckily coinciding. If they didn't, we would have a serious problem. Luckily, the imperatives are coinciding and they're stacking up on each other. So the morality imperative and the economical imperative and the technological are actually coinciding, and that's why we're moving forward. We still have a long way to go to incorporate intergenerational long term issues into our political culture. Thank you, Cristiana. We're going to talk about that. But first, I want to go to Jojita. Jojita, you've been concerned for a long time and have done lots of research on coordination mechanisms to deal with the commons. And it is a very complex issue in the best of circumstances. And we know, and Cristiana just mentioned the issue of intertemporal justice, that climate policy is distributed policy. I'm just curious, how do democracies overcome the reluctance to impose costs to often highly organized groups in order to protect public goods, a sustainable climate being the ultimate public good? Okay, so I'll try to sort of turn this question a bit around. If you look at the fact that whether you talk about climate change or you talk about land or water or any of the other issues that are hitting planetary boundaries, essentially what you're seeing is a struggle for power or control over these resources or the ability to emit greenhouse gases. Now, and then the question is, who is in power? Who is controlling this? And what you find is in modern Western democracies today, we are very, very neoliberal. We are very capitalistic in our approach. And that basically means that to some extent, we're trying to control the commons through commodification and privatization through the use of market mechanisms. And this can work negatively for solving some of these problems. And that is one of the reasons why you have a challenge. Another problem that you find when you have scarce resources and a limited capacity to dump waste or greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is that states tend to focus on hegemonic approaches. So they'll say, my country first. And in that situation, what you find is that in the global arena, the democracy is actually not really working. And within the domestic context of democratic countries, you find that the most powerful actors are the ones that then try to claim the right to control and the right to decide how climate change is to be addressed. And that for me is a real challenge. Thank you. That's very interesting. The other question that I wanted to ask you, Jorita, and this stems from one of the points raised by Daniel in his initial presentation. You've been part of multiple scientific panels dealing with the climate crisis, including the intergovernmental panel on climate change. In your view, and I guess this is a relevant question also in view of the current pandemic, how good are democracies in absorbing scientific research into their policy processes? And how can we best reinforce the capacity of democracies to do just that? And in fact, then I'm going to completely agree with Christiana on this issue because I have a PhD student looking at how China is dealing with the science of climate change, both at the national level, but also all the way down to the local level. And you can see very clearly that in the case of climate change, the Chinese government authorities are trying to build on the science. Now, if you look across the ocean, if you look at the United States, then scientific information that focuses on risk was not considered very, very popular under the Trump government. So, you know, it's not about democracies versus dictatorships here. It really depends on your leadership and that's something we really have to bring forward. It's not that I'm in favor of dictatorships. It's just simply that in a democracy, you could have systems where those in power are unwilling or uninterested in hearing about the risks that are embedded in sciences, whether it's about climate change or it's about medical issues or other technologies that have risks attached to them. Thank you. We have very little time left and of course we could keep this discussion going on for a long time, but it seems to me that one of the critical issues when it comes to dealing with climate change within a democracy is that the future has no obvious political constituency in the present. Only the young, at best. And they have been making their voices heard through civic movements such as Fridays for Future, Zero Hour, Extinction, Rebellion. So, here is a question to all of you and please, if you can, give me very pointed answers. What experiences have you seen and what ideas do you have about how to institutionally incorporate the voice of young people into the process of crafting climate policy? Who goes first? For like 30 seconds. This is like presidential debates. Well, I can jump in, first of all, with a huge and enthusiastic support for civil disobedience. Not that it's the only one, but it's very powerful. And we know from history that there has never been a deep social, political and economic change in most of our countries without civil disobedience. So, huge support for civil, peaceful, civil disobedience that is already having a huge effect on many of our democracies. If I go next, I would say that the use of the courts are very important and young people in many parts of the world are now going to courts, whether in the western world or in the southern world. And in fact, I think the courts are also a place that can represent the future. And they also take science very seriously in most cases. And finally, I think it's not just the youth, I think it's the youth in collaboration with the senior citizens, because I think senior citizens with pensions have the time to think about the future. So I think that group of communities must collaborate to promote change. Thank you. Dan. I think if I take up your challenge, Kevin, which I find kind of next to impossible being a young heart in an old body. It is, of course, it's crucial to involve young people, but it's also crucial to involve older people and it's crucial to involve the people in between. It's the some part of me which wants to reject the idea that there is a particular constituency that should be particularly worried about this, because I'm a little bit afraid that that offers an alibi to the others whom you don't mention. This is an issue not just it is an issue for our grandchildren, but not just for them because it's an issue for right now. 650,000 Somalis have been forcibly displaced during the course of 2020 as a result of floods. And in Somalia every year you get either a flood or a drought and occasionally if you're extremely unlucky you more or less get both. And over the past 60 years that that's been possible to track temperatures. Somali temperatures have been rising steadily and consistently. This is about climate change having an impact now. Nobody should run away if we're talking about the youth and it is crucial that young people get more and more involved in this, but nobody should run away and think that this is an issue for the youth because they will inherit the world that is changed by climate. Our world is changing right now and the real problem without not just our democracies, but our autocracies and our private sector and everything is that we, they are too slow to recognize what is happening and to act upon it. Thank you all. Now we're going to open it up for about five minutes. Unfortunately we don't have more time also because I know that Cristiana has to leave. We'll take a few questions from our audience, probably a couple. And I will ask again our panelists to be very succinct with their answers. There's a question which I find interesting because it sort of deals with the twin crisis of climate and democracy. The question reads like this, is the rise of populism a threat to climate change policies? Or can the energy of populist leaders be harnessed to push sustainability? Is populism inherently skeptical of climate change policies? Who wants to have a crack at that one? Yeah, I can jump in. Unfortunately those two lines have seemed to coincide in the past few years and that is unfortunate because they don't have to coincide. The fact is that yes, on the one hand you do need collaboration, multilateral efforts, collaboration across sectors, across countries to deal with climate change. So that would speak against a populist support. However, at the same time what is also true is as we've just heard that no one is exempted from participating here and in as much as each person understands whether they believe in the science or not, whether they believe in democracies or not, whether they believe in multilateralism or not. But actually our personal lives right now are better if we move ourselves to homes that are better insulated to electricity that is cleaner to vehicles that are non-polluting. We can improve the quality of our lives right now if you want to see it from the very, very narrow constraint of the quality of my personal life without giving the hoot about everyone else. You can actually bring the good thing is that again here the imperatives actually stack up with each other. We don't have to choose between the two. So my sense is let's meet everyone where they are. We don't have to convince them necessarily to change their political ideology, their political philosophy. Everyone is actually benefited whether individually, corporately and nationwide planetary by actually decarbonizing our personal economy and certainly the planetary economy and we don't have to have ideological fights. I think that's a really useful way of getting into this discussion, Kevin. I know that you don't have very much time. So let me just say that if you approach the question of climate change and politics from the policy angle, you're going to find that the policies which are needed are very challenging and very complex. We have to kind of put years of production of carbon CO2 equivalent. We have to put that process into reverse very fast and this is very challenging. As you said, it's a real wicked problem. From that point of view, you could say, well, populism with its taste for simplifying issues is inimical to good climate change policy. But seen on the other side where you get towards thinking about the reality of this in people's lives, in ordinary people's lives as this issue unfolds, then I think that that simplicity that populism deals in is actually something that it is worth taking very seriously and understanding how that works. And then I don't think there is necessarily any clash between more populist politics and good climate change policy. If you look at pension policies in the western world, then most of our pensions are invested in fossil fuels. And the problem is when they try to get rid of their fossil fuels, if they sell it to the global south, then you get a new vested interest. So there will be a reaction when people feel that their pensions may be affected because their investments in fossil fuels have to be written off, which is what I think should happen. May I say something quickly about that as well? Yeah, please. I mean, I was about to say, I'll give the final word to Daniel, who's been patiently hearing all the comments. And I will throw a final question at you, Daniel. Okay. One of the questions that we received is about the declarations of climate emergencies that are becoming popular in many countries, whether this kind of instrument offer governments the opportunity to trample over democratic rights. So, the final word goes to you. Well, they could be positive in the sense that they communicate the emergency of the issue and they can prioritize certain things, but they need to be very concrete in delivering solutions. And I think what I've seen so far is that we have parliaments that declare a climate emergency situation, but nothing has really happened and then I think this becomes a symbolic policy, which is not very contributing to the solutions of the climate crisis. So we should be very careful what we actually, what kind of rhetoric we put into the discussion here. If I just, you know, in connection to that, I think we will, when it comes to, I mean, the situation right now is that we see in the populistic movement being quite naturalistic and he's taking a stance against climate science. But I think as some of you said, that's not a natural position. I mean, nationalist in historically speaking, we're not aggressively against environmental protection. And I wouldn't be surprised to see a change in the logic positions of the populist movement taking a stance of protecting climate, but that would come with a different approach on how we should regulate, for instance, migration and those kinds of affairs. So I think we have to be, we have to understand that saving the climate, fighting the climate change is one issue, but it comes together with other aspects of caring for human values and so forth. Thank you very much, Daniel, and that's a very, very good way to wrap this discussion up, because it actually ties up with some of the things that the young fellows from the international youth think tank mentioned. I mean, one of the things that I noticed in their presentation was an unceasing concern, a very intense concern for the issues connected to inequality, global inequality, and that's obviously connected to this. This has been a treat. We barely touched the surface of the discussion, but do not despair. For idea, this is merely the kickoff of an institutional effort to explore systematically this enormously important discussion. I want to thank in a heartfelt way our four panelists for providing us with wonderful insights to take this discussion forward. So thank you all, and now I hand it over to you, Alina, to introduce our next and very distinguished speaker. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kevin, and thank you so much to all the panelists. I was listening here on the side and I really also found it a truly fascinating discussion that I hope will continue. Now we have unfortunately come to our last speaker of the day. However, we are very fortunate that it is the Swedish Minister of International Development Cooperation, Mr. Pettit Eksson, who is a strong lifelong supporter and believer in actions to counter climate change and to protect the environment. Mr. Eksson, you have the floor to provide us with your closing remarks. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much, and thank you all to this super interesting discussion. Congratulations to Kevin Casasamara, the General Secretary, and the idea for this first day of your 25th anniversary meeting. I am really impressed and I think you've done a good job. I want to take this possibility to actually go on and say a little of my sort of views on this questions on democracy and climate change, which I have worked on practically all my grown up life. So it's impossible not for me to take some part in this discussion. I think for the first that democracy is a goal. It's not only one of several methods of decision making. It's important to see that it is a goal also for people because we can see it as something that people get the possibility to be grown up, to be looked at as equals and be respected and together form their future for the common good, not only for themselves. And that is also the basic for taking more of responsibility for each other, for your neighbors and for your families and for also the country and the planet as a whole and also your grandchildren. And that is the basic, I think, possibility that makes democracy as something more than just decision making. And also what Daniel was into, which I think is very much on the spot that we need a learning system. And in democracies you have something that can be of a learning system. And in many cases we can see that it works but not good enough. Especially when you compare it with something else. And the basic question that all discussion if democracy is something that we want or if we should have something else is what is the alternative. Well, if you look at it, there is not so many other alternatives that is possible. Also because if you take every other alternatives, you cannot choose your leaders. You cannot choose what this alternative should do because if you have lost the possibility to change leaders and change political parties and governments, then you also have given up the possibility to correct the position and the decisions that they have taken. So I think basically democracy is better than any other known alternative because you can correct it. It is a goal and it has something in it that it makes it possible to be a learning system. And that is very important. Then you can ask also why does not people, if you talk about, for example, the climate issue or also the biodiversity questions and other questions that is important for our survival. Why does not people choose leaders to stop climate change? That is the other question that we could ask. Often you talk about politicians, why don't they take the right decisions? But you can also say why doesn't people choose the right politicians? And that is a tougher question, I should say. But in my opinion there is, once again, it's quite a lot on the learning question. We need systems that are educative and learning. And to be that, you need other parts that is essential and central in a good modern democratic system. For example, openness, freedom of press, freedom of expression, low grade of corruption. And if you look at these things together, you can very much see that the world right now does not need more authoritarian regimes. That is not what we need. That will not make a big difference to reach the important thing around climate change or biodiversity or fighting hunger and all these things. What we need is more of democracy. It's more of openness, freedom, freedom of press and expression and less of corruption and institutions that are organized to serve people and work for the common good. I think to reach a situation where we can get more democracy in the world today, that knows that this is the right thing. We must stand up better for democracy. We must take the fight again and realize that this is important and we will not win the future and the fight of our time if we're not standing up for democracy. And I think we should fight and do more also to make better possibilities for people to participate and take part in decision making. My experience is very much that when you give people power, they also take responsibility. And if you see that more people take more responsibility, they are also open to take decisions that sometimes could be bad for them personally in the short run and take more long run decisions. And I have more than many other people practiced this in reality. For example, when I was a mayor in my hometown, we had tried to direct democracy in many times and did things that really could show that this is a reality if you do it in a good way. So, people, I thank you for this discussion. I congratulate Idea for its work. And I think Idea has come in more to the front the latest years, doing more now than ever before to be a part in a living debate on democracy and taking part of the international discussion. And I think that is very important. But then also I think this anniversary is a real show to people that Idea is needed in the coming years and in the fight in the world of a better world. And also for people to be part of a decision making system that is learning and is taking the people that takes responsibility for their future. Thank you. Thank you so much, Minister Ericsson, for your strong message of support and truly it was music to our ears when you said we need more democracy. And with these words, I would now like to pass the floor for the last time to our Secretary General, Dr. Kevin Casa-Samora, who will close today's session. Thank you so much for staying with us. Thank you, Alina, once again. It has been a pleasure and an honor for International Idea to host this discussion, which as I said, I hope will be the first of many on these critical issues. After all, securing the future of democracy is what Idea's mission is all about. Once again, my gratitude goes to all the speakers and participants in this session. And I would like to invite you all to continue enjoying the program that we have put together for this global conference for the 25th anniversary of our Institute. Thank you very much and please stay safe. In difficult times, such as the ones we live in, Spain is firmly convinced of the importance of robust democracies, inclusive multilateralism and global cooperation. Democracy cannot fall victim to the pandemic. It is imperative to remain committed to promoting and strengthening democratic values. We are also convinced that upholding multilateralism is the only way forward to deal with the major global challenges ahead of us, as well with the consequences of the pandemic. Happy 25th anniversary, dear Idea Institute and your colleagues. Let's continue working together, 25 more years towards sustainable and resilient democracies. Hello. It is my pleasure to extend my sincere greetings to all of you on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. It is the right time to reflect what we've achieved in the past 25 years. Democracy is not a single short effort. It requires constant attention and care. It requires polishing from promoting democratic education to educating people on democratic values. The idea is championing in this area to further promote democratic institutions and democratic values throughout the world. Once again, I wish to extend my sincere appreciation to Idea and happy 25th anniversary. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate International Idea for its 25th anniversary. As you may know, Chile is a founder member of Idea and our commitment to democracy remains stronger than ever. We believe that during this difficult time of the pandemic, the work of Idea is more important than ever to defend democratic values worldwide. So I want to congratulate especially to all the staff members, both in Stockholm and in the regional offices for this anniversary. And I encourage you to continue working to defend the values that founded this great institution. Congratulations to International Idea on its 25th anniversary. The German government is proud to be a member of International Idea. Over the past 25 years, International Idea has proven to be an important thing and do tank for the promotion of democracy around the globe. Nowadays, this task is more important than ever. The world faces an erosion of democratic systems and of civic and political space, worsened by COVID-19 crisis. We have to protect democratic values in all parts of the world. Germany is strongly committed to this challenge. German Development Corporation is focusing on democracy protection and promotion in more than 40 partner countries. And we are very happy to partner with International Idea in this endeavor. Minister of International Development, I'm sending you this message to celebrate the 25th anniversary of International Idea. Canada is committed to promoting and protecting democracy worldwide. Since becoming a member state of International Idea in 1997, we have been supporting and working closely with your organization. We value your strong international reputation, extensive programming and high quality policy products. For example, we have benefited from your biennial report, The Global State of Democracy and your leadership in calling to defend democracy during the COVID-19 crisis. We particularly appreciated the valuable insights you had provided during consultations for our feminist international assistance policy a few years ago. With democracy under constant threat, we look forward to continuing to work with International Idea to support democratic development and inclusive governance across the world. Thank you and Happy Anniversary! Dear Idea Secretary-General, colleagues and friends, Finland is a founding member of the International Idea and we are proud of that. Nobel Peace Prize awarded and former President of Finland, Martti Ahtisari, was a member of the first Idea Board. Finland has contributed Idea's work for many years in Myanmar at present. Idea data and tools are used by Finnish ministries, political parties and academia in advancing new forms of democracy. Democracy, the most successful political idea of the 20th century, is now challenged by authoritarian regimes and movements. We need Idea, its member states and its dedicated staff in defending democracy and human rights. And all together, we can strengthen a sustainable democracy for next decades. After 25 years, International Idea is old enough to know better and young enough to be in one card to promote democracy. Happy Anniversary! Thank you for your work in promoting democracy and human rights in the world. The effects of the pandemic show us that democracy is not a finished task without a permanent exercise for which it is necessary to have solid and effective institutions that make possible more fair and inclusive societies. Thus, next, to celebrate its bicentenary of Republican life, Peru has launched internal reforms to improve the representation and electoral system, whose results must be verified in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2021. In this hemisphere and as a promoter of the Inter-American Democratic Party, Peru is still committed to the values that inspire and continue to promote peaceful actions to recover democracy where it is vulnerable. As a member of this organization and a member of a national office, they receive the testimony of the unvariable bet of Peru for strengthening democracy and governability, as well as the return to International Idea in this shared task. Thank you very much. Greetings from the Australian Embassy in Stockholm and congratulations to International Idea on its 25th anniversary. It's great that colleagues in Australia can participate in this event, including the President of the Australian Senate, Scott Ryan. Australia is proud to be a founding member of International Idea, and we thank Idea for its ongoing efforts to promote and to protect democracy and support free and fair elections around the world. We value International Idea's role in our region. COVID-19 is testing all of our institutions, from the global level to the local level. It's clear that democracies have to stand up against efforts by some actors to use the pandemic as an opportunity to erode democracy and advance an authoritarian agenda. Governments need to find ways to balance respect for civil and political rights with the safety of communities. Supporting gender equality and women's empowerment is also vital to strengthening democracy. Australia looks forward to succeeding Sweden as chair of the Council of Member States for International Idea in 2021, and taking forward this important work. On behalf of the Government of Uruguay, it is my pleasure to convey our most sincere and warm congratulations to International Idea on its 25th anniversary. We would like to recognize the relevance of the organization in promoting and strengthening democracy around the world and commend its Secretary General and all the staff for their work. Today, the current context of COVID-19 represents an additional challenge to democracy, and we need to ensure that electoral processes take place in a credible and transparent manner. Uruguay is proud to be one of the full democracies in the world, and it has recently conducted elections during the COVID-19 scenario, confirming that it is possible to ensure a ballot if suitable precautions are taken. You're ready to collaborate with other countries by sharing our experience. Finally, current circumstances are showing a deterioration on the quality of democracy and respect for human rights around the globe, and for this reason, we believe it is more relevant than ever that International Idea plays an active role by providing relevant insight and knowledge to help us defend our core values. Dear audience, I would like to congratulate International Idea with its 25th anniversary. Of course, democracy itself already dates back over 2,500 years, which is also cause for celebration. Today, it is as important as it was in ancient history to ensure fair and effective representation of the people. We as the Netherlands are long-term supporters of International Idea. Throughout the years, we have very much valued the tremendous work, events, tools and studies of the Secretariat and our International Corporation with Idea Member States in the Council. Today, we celebrate Idea's anniversary during the global COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis with unprecedented effects, also on democracy and elections worldwide. Idea rightfully addresses these risks and puts them on the international agenda. This to me shows the continued value and agility of International Idea. I firmly believe that Idea's efforts are very important in advancing democracy both in context where it is newly embraced as well as in established democracies. Congratulations with this milestone. This milestone is in the fiber of the CEL Costa Recense, and that is why we are part of this group from its beginnings. We share with Idea the premise that democracy is a universal aspiration, and so it is for all sectors of society that receive its benefits directly. Women, children, teenagers, youth, indigenous people, older adults, people with disabilities, descendants, and the LGTBIQ Plus population are part of the national order that nourishes democratic political processes, strong and open spaces for the free manifestation of their ideas. The current pandemic is changing how we live our lives and how political leaders are making decisions. The current situation underlines the importance of well-functioning institutions and trust between people and the authorities. Democracy, youth, and climate change is a timely topic. Today's young people are not only our future leaders, but also our future guardians of democracy and our future guardians of the environment. The persistence and bravery of young people who are demanding democracy across the world gives us hope. Popular decisions may be effective in the short term, but they're not always the right decisions for future generations. Democracy, human rights, and the rule of law are essential for young people to be able to control and shape their own destiny. Teaching children and young people to become active citizens through an understanding of democratic norms and practices is an important element in creating lasting peace. I would like to thank International Idea for your important contributions in building sustainable democracy over the last 25 years. The fight for democracy is not over. COVID-19 has made the organization's mission even more relevant. You have an important role to play also in the next 25 years. Happy anniversary! It's my pleasure and privilege to congratulate the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. On its 25th anniversary on behalf of India, the largest democracy in the world. Democracy needs to be cherished, preserved, and celebrated. Every effort to strengthen democracy is a welcome force multiplier. In the last 25 years, IIDA has contributed to advancing democracy around the world and deserves our greetings on its 25th anniversary. India is happy to have supported International IDEA from its inception in 1995. On this occasion, I would also like to compliment the Swedish government in taking a lead in the establishment of the International IDEA. In India, the democratic ideals have permeated to everyday reality from their high pedestal of the constitution. Beginning with an ambitious, almost impossible project of universal added suffrage of its diverse and numerous people after independence in 1947, India has held 17 successful general elections so far. The 2019 general elections had a voter count of more than 900 million with nearly 1 million polling stations across the country. International IDEA has also witnessed this gigantic festival of democracy. As many parts in the world are increasingly faced with strife and conflict. Promotion of sustainable democracy and democratic institutions by International IDEA for inclusive socio-economic development in these societies assume more significance than ever before. India, before the election commission of India, India through the election commission of India is actively engaged in exchange of standard operating procedures and know-how on conduct of transparent, fair and open elections with countries around the world. IIDA is welcome to benefit from and collaborate in this regard to promote democracy and equal rights to all. It's our firm belief that in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic, democracy and democratic institutions have proved effective in fighting the known and unknown challenges of our times. I am confident that through our common and diverse democratic ideals would be strengthened further and there would be more prosperity and peace across the world in the years to come. Thank you for the attention.