The Future Summit, held in September 2024, was hailed as a historic milestone with the adoption of the "Pact for the Future." This ambitious text promises to address our times’ most complex issues, regarding international peace, security, emerging technologies, and of course, reducing global inequalities. However, on closer inspection, what appears to be a bold step forward hides an often-overlooked reality: International meetings’ outcomes often struggle to translate into concrete actions. Pandemics, conflicts at every corner, inflation and climate change are all issues that impede efforts to move forward ending inequalities and protecting the planet.

The 2023 edition of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) report provided some insightful facts likely to support this. Of the 140 targets of the SDGs, 15% are doing pretty well, while 48% are stagnating with 37% recording no progress or regressing according to the 2015 report. This is worrying and disturbing because one only has to look at the calendar and realize that we are seven years away from 2030.

Luckily, it's not lost on world leaders that urgent action needs to be taken. This is exactly why at the UNGA meeting in New York in September 2023, the report titled "Towards a Rescue Plan for People and Planet" was issued. Except just one year later, in September this year, they were in the same New York for another meeting at the end of which the "Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact, and Declaration on Future Generations" was adopted. That is good. We should not be ungrateful to the point of overlooking their concerns for our planet. But what else? Who is taking us to the world where we will wake up one day to realize that the planet’s crises are being solved by pacts’ adoption and endless meetings? When is it going to happen?

Golden promises, leaden results

So, as is the case of most similar big meetings, this summit’s pact also stood out with the strongness of its statements. One of its most innovative aspects is undoubtedly the Global Digital Compact, a framework intended to guarantee international cooperation in the digital space. The commitment to regulating artificial intelligence, promoting digital public goods and combating online disinformation marks a step forward. However, this modernity is counterbalanced by the stagnation of other areas like challenges relating to climate, access to health, education, the fight against malnutrition, the protection of biodiversity or financing for development.

The reaffirmation of commitments in favor of nuclear disarmament, although important, seems to be part of a continuity that is more symbolic than transformative but pointless in either case as countries like the United States, Russia or China continue to modernize their arsenals and develop new military technologies. Such a fact is a testimony of commitments being disconnected from geopolitical realities, in a world where citizens still need to beg for their basic human rights, when they are not denied.

Commitment or mirage?

The pact affirms the importance of involving young people in global governance, a promise repeated at every major summit. Yet for decades, young people have continued to experience systemic exclusion from decision-making processes. While the declarations multiply, the reality remains implacable: Young people, particularly in the countries of the Global South, still do not benefit from real representation. One thing is for sure, a Global Youth Fund’s creation is an encouraging initiative, but how many of these funds will actually be released and allocated equitably? More importantly, will these young people have concrete power of influence, or will they only be symbols, of young faces placed to give an illusion of change in a fundamentally unchanged system?

This interrogation of youth involvement is all the more relevant as their marginalization perpetuates dynamics of inequality and fuels social frustrations in many regions. Young people excluded from decisions are prey to disillusionment, often pushed toward precariousness and more extreme forms of protest.

The Pact for the Future reaffirms the United Nations’ role in conflict prevention and civilians’ protection, two historic objectives of the organization. But in a world where wars prolong and diplomacy seems paralyzed by divergent geopolitical interests, such commitments appear once again pointless. The war in Ukraine, the Middle East on fire, chaos in the Sahel and the crime against the Palestinians are so many disorders that lead us to question the role of the international community as claimed. After decades of often ineffective missions, promises regarding the U.N. peace operations look more like a repeat of past promises than a true paradigm shift.

An ever-widening divide

Despite its ambitions, the pact exposes an increasingly obvious divide between diplomatic discourse and the realities experienced by millions of people around the world. Climate commitments, notably the objective of keeping temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), are painful reminders of the broken promises of previous COPs. As natural disasters increase, forests disappear, and people suffer the devastating effects of climate change. Therefore, it becomes difficult to believe that the decisions taken at this summit will be enough to reverse the trend. Financial commitments to fill the SDG's financing gap seem far from the concerns of ordinary citizens. In a world where inequalities are increasing, where developing countries struggle to access financial resources to invest in their future, the hope of seeing concrete measures resulting from this pact seems very slim.

The Summit of the Future may well intend to be a turning point for a changing world, but this does not change the fact that it remains marred by a dissonance between the major declarations of principle and the reality of the global balance of power. We won’t achieve sustainable development by endlessly ritualizing commitments at summits without actions.

While some symbolic progress has been made, particularly in terms of digital governance, national priorities, power struggles and institutional slowness make its implementation uncertain. The path to a sustainable future remains paved with uncertainty, and the history of international summits teaches us that without constant pressure from civil society and a real will of economic and political actors, the fine promises risk remaining a dead letter.

In the current context, where crises are accumulating and inequalities worsening, this pact could well be just another summit among many, another pompous promise serving as a pretext to postpone real changes, in a system that struggles to meet the real needs of populations. And at this point, there is no doubt, as said by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, that, "Unless we act now, the 2030 Agenda will become an epitaph for a world that might have been."