How Youth Participation Can Improve Resilience in Business and Peacebuilding

An interview with Luca Guidoboni, INCAS Group Executive Officer

As Group Executive Officer, Luca Guidoboni is a core member of the INCAS Executive Team, providing vital support to the CEO, Group Directors and Advisors. He also serves part-time as a Youth Fellow for Swedish think tank International Youth Think Tank, for which he recently published a paper on the benefits of youth inclusion in official decision-making processes.

We sat down with Luca to talk about how youth inclusion improves organisational performance, the challenge of systemic barriers to youth participation, and what role consultancies like INCAS can play.

Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:

Q: You argue that youth inclusion improves decision-making across diverse fields, fostering strategic effectiveness and sustainable peace in peacebuilding, and enhancing problem-solving in corporate boardrooms. What’s your thinking?

Luca: Nowadays, we hear a lot about the youth peace and security agenda. There’s a trend of youth-focused summits serving as counterparts to prominent global summits, like COP’s Conference of Youth (COY). While this affords young people the opportunity to speak about the issues that are the most pressing to them, the results often do not really matter to global decision-makers. I was interested in looking at how and why young people should be involved in the official tracks of such summits – not parallel ones – because otherwise, so-called youth inclusion simply becomes an example of tokenism. ??

It’s worth noting that a common bias, looking at youth inclusivity, is to think that we’re advocating for an 18-year-old to become the President of a country. This isn’t what we mean at all. When we define “youth,” we’re commonly referring to people aged between 18 and 35 years old. This is the age range of people who are currently being excluded from decision-making bodies – which are generally dominated by people aged 55 and over.

Well-documented research into intellectual diversity (which, at its simplest level, refers to a multiplicity of ideas) and cognitive diversity (commonly defined as the differences in perspective or information processing styles among people) shows that diversity within decision-making bodies improves decision-making and problem-solving even when compared to expertise alone. In my research, I looked at existing literature to try to understand if greater youth inclusion, as a specific metric for improving age diversity, could be a driver of improvement in decision-making. And what I found is that, yes, there is evidence of this – particularly in business.

Q: What’s the explanation for this? Different people offer a variety of approaches to solving a thorny problem, as opposed to everyone putting forward the same kinds of idea?

Luca: That is essentially it. How each case unfolds depends on its circumstances and on the broader context. But a correlation has been observed. To give an example, one study in the Netherlands showed that companies that employed more young people were more resilient during the 2012 economic crisis than their counterparts with fewer youth employees. Having young people on executive boards won’t solve all the risks that private companies face, but it's another way to improve a company’s resilience while driving general inclusivity. ?

The key takeaway is that it isn’t our role, as young people, to say “Yes, we’re here too. Thank you for including us.” Age diversity is like other areas where we should be thinking about inclusivity for pragmatic reasons, just as with ethnicity and gender. An organisation that prioritises cognitive diversity alongside things like field expertise and knowledge simply performs better.

Still, the situation is more straightforward in business than in peacebuilding – which obviously takes place in more complex environments, with many more variables. The benefits of youth inclusion, which are so clear in the business sector, can be more complicated in peacebuilding. On one hand, directly including anyone in peace processes can pose additional security risks by putting them in the spotlight. Youth involvement in peacebuilding efforts can also be linked to socioeconomic interventions designed to improve their opportunities, which ties into complex dynamics of socioeconomic exclusion. On the other hand, including youth in official peace processes can help to dilute the impact of the grievances entrenched in the minds of older people. Youth inclusion is also empowering and can help to counter radicalisation. ??

Q: To what extent does this kind of inclusion have a cultural component? Is it fair to say that certain cultural contexts are more receptive to youth inclusion than others?

Luca: Yes, it is. Having said that, the cultural and psychosocial arguments for not including young people in key decision-making processes have been debunked many times. But of course, real behaviour change can be very complicated and take a long time. This is exactly why we need specific policies and youth quotas – to help break the cultural barriers that remain an impediment to youth inclusion. Such quotas could be designed in many ways and tailored to specific country conditions or even implemented at the local level. Even when policies and quotas are implemented, young people may often struggle to be accepted by older colleagues or find themselves marginalised within organisations and institutions. So, there is no perfect solution.

Q: As a complement to quotas, are there programmes or grassroots movements you’re aware of that are designed to help young people become more involved in decision-making processes?

Luca: To be honest, there may be hundreds of thousands of youth-led organisations trying to do this. On one level, everything is helpful because everything is a step forward. But it can be difficult to understand which are the most impactful initiatives because there is so much out there. Sometimes, people argue that, because young people now have so many more opportunities than older generations to have our voices heard – especially with youth departments, youth conferences and digital technologies – we should be content with the progress made and not push for more. But there are still structural and systemic barriers that are preventing young people from having an actual impact in decision-making.

In terms of specific initiatives doing great work on youth inclusiveness, the International Youth Think Tank is one and the Athens Democracy Forum is another. ?

Q: And what role can a consultancy like INCAS play in helping to increase youth participation in areas like peacebuilding and decision-making?

Luca: Increasing youth inclusivity within consultancies can be challenging, as the field traditionally values deep expertise. However, at INCAS, we recognise that expertise can be nurtured and that young professionals bring valuable perspectives, fresh ideas, and agility to problem-solving.

Consultancies, including INCAS, can enhance youth participation by integrating a youth lens as they would a gender or climate perspective. This means making a concerted effort to engage young professionals in meaningful ways, ensuring their input is valued beyond tokenistic participation.

At INCAS, we prioritise our clients’ needs and the expertise required for each assignment while also staying mindful of our broader impact—particularly in fragile and conflict-affected areas. That’s why we actively seek opportunities to integrate youth participation where it adds the most value.

Personally, I have been involved in high-level decision-making within INCAS, where my perspectives are not just heard but acted upon. This has tangible benefits for the company, making it more responsive to emerging challenges and innovations. For instance, based on my recommendations, INCAS has adopted specific technologies to address complex issues in our work.

Beyond consultancies, there is still progress to be made in normalising youth participation in decision-making across sectors. Too often, young people face unintentional barriers, whether through outdated perceptions about experience or inclusion efforts that do not translate into real influence. While this challenge exists in corporate and political environments, meaningful youth participation strengthens organisations and societies by bringing in fresh perspectives and fostering better governance.

There are various ways to facilitate this. In politics, youth participatory budgeting and electoral engagement offer structured opportunities. In business, it would be beneficial to circulate more existing recommendations on how private sector firms—especially consultancies—can balance inclusivity with expertise, knowledge requirements, and market demands. These discussions should be embedded in companies’ internal strategies rather than treated as one-size-fits-all solutions.

While youth inclusion alone won’t solve every challenge, increasing diversity in decision-making leads to more adaptive and forward-thinking governance—whether in a state, a city, or a private company. And that really matters.