Youth leaders and UNESCO advance intercultural dialogue at the 2026 Global Forum on Intercultural Competence

At the 2026 Global Forum on Intercultural and Global Competence held online between 20 and 23 April 2026, UNESCO participated to share the breadth of its experience in intercultural dialogue - bringing together insights from youth-led initiatives, field-based work and concrete policy tools developed across education, social and human sciences, peacebuilding and the digital sphere.

At a time of increasing polarisation, rapid technological transformation and rising geopolitical tensions, the Forum focused on a question that is becoming increasingly concrete for policymakers: how do institutions work across difference?

The opening youth plenary made the gap between institutional expectations and practical support visible in concrete, grounded terms. Five young leaders from UNESCO’s Youth for Peace: Intercultural Leadership Programme - Charlotte Courtois (France), Juan Cristiani (Uruguay), Sarah Noble (Canada), Noor Jehan Docrat (South Africa), and Ahmed Essam Haroun (Egypt) — drew on projects spanning inclusive education, community health outreach, climate and environmental action, youth arts initiatives, and peacebuilding in local communities.

What they described were not abstract qualities, but the core components of intercultural leadership as developed through the programme: building trust across divides, listening and mediating between perspectives, recognising power dynamics and cultural bias, and turning dialogue into collective action. These are practised skills, shaped in real-world contexts where outcomes are uncertain and tensions are often high.

Despite having different contexts, the young leaders’ experiences converged. Establishing trust takes time. Misunderstandings are often structural, not just interpersonal. Dialogue works when it is sustained, not one-off. And in many cases, institutions expect these capacities to exist without providing the support to develop them.

The following day showed how these challenges are being translated into concrete resources for institutions and policymakers. In higher education, UNESCO presented More than Welcome: Intercultural Integration of Migrants in and through Higher Education as a framework universities can use directly. The focus is on what happens after access: how students interact, how teaching is organised, and how institutions connect with their wider communities. By setting out five practical principles, the initiative helps universities move from enrolling diverse students to creating environments where that diversity leads to exchange, learning and social cohesion.

In fragile and conflict-affected contexts, the Intercultural Dialogue for Conflict Transformation policy brief series addresses a distinct set of pressures. Developed with four leading peacebuilding partners and informed by more than 25 country case studies, the series demonstrates the value of embedding dialogic approaches in the design and implementation of peace processes. Across four dimensions of conflict transformation, namely social cohesion, prevention, transitional justice, and reconciliation, the briefs show, through concrete examples, how dialogue can help rebuild trust, address grievances and support locally led pathways to durable peace and social resilience.

UNESCO’s forthcoming guide on intercultural dialogue for museums and public institutions explores how spaces of learning and public engagement can foster dialogue and mutual understanding across communities. Rather than focusing solely on preservation, the guidance examines how institutions can actively engage audiences in dialogue, helping them develop intercultural competence, deconstruct stereotypes and strengthen social cohesion.

In the digital sphere, UNESCO presented Intercultural Approaches to Digital Competence: A Framework for Policy and Practice, which introduces intercultural dimensions into existing digital skills frameworks. By adding indicators across areas such as communication, content creation and online participation — and grounding them in perspectives like Ubuntu — the framework helps institutions assess whether their digital environments support or hinder interaction across cultures. An accompanying AI-assisted tool makes this assessment actionable.

Across both days, a consistent picture emerged: the challenges described on the ground are already well known, but not always matched by structured responses at institutional level. UNESCO’s contribution to the Forum was to close this gap — bringing forward tested approaches and practical frameworks that policymakers and institutions can adapt to their own contexts.