Advancing UN Prevention Efforts Across Sectors and Institutions: Collective Pathways for Effective Prevention

The United Nations (UN) Charter underscores the centrality of conflict prevention as a critical component of the global effort to ensure long-term peace, sustainable development and human rights. Since taking office, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has made a commitment to put the prevention agenda front and centre across all of the UN’s work.
 

In 2020, the UN, Member States, civil society and other stakeholders assessed the progress achieved across the peace, development and human rights agendas, and identified the steps for accelerating this progress, highlighting prevention as a priority. Various processes, including the commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the UN, with the adoption of the Political Declaration (A/75/1); the launch of the 2030 Decade of Action on Sustainable Development; the anniversaries of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agendas; and the 2020 Peacebuilding Architecture Review, offered an opportunity to reflect upon how far the international community has progressed on prevention and ways to overcome challenges and build upon successes.

In conjunction with these processes, the Civil Society-UN Prevention Platform facilitated a 2020 series of discussions titled, UN Prevention Across Sectors and Institutions: Pathways for Effective Prevention. The series brought together Member States, UN agencies, and international and local civil society to reflect on the future of prevention as it relates to key UN Agendas (i.e., the WPS, YPS, sustainable development, peacebuilding and sustaining peace) and prevention topics (i.e., mediation, climate change and upstream prevention). The outcome of the discussion series is a report that shares good practices and key challenges for each thematic area and outlines opportunities for strengthening prevention across the UN system.

Please find the Executive Summary of the Report here.