CASE Study: United Nations Development Program (UNDP) / Institutions & youth futures

Understanding how young people imagine the future

scenarioDNA helped the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) understand how young people across 12 nations were making sense of uncertainty, opportunity, and the future. The research combined social discourse, university news, and in-country cultural analysis to inform a strategic narrative framework.

The question: How is the future understood under pressure?

UNDP needed to understand young people's perspectives across diverse national contexts. The brief concerned how uncertainty and opportunity were being interpreted, and what those interpretations could mean for future-facing communications and policy dialogue.

The research: Connecting discourse with local context

We synthesized more than 5,000 social posts, 28 university news sources, and in-country cultural analysis across 12 nations. This brought several kinds of evidence into the same inquiry, connecting expressions of youth sentiment with cultural interpretation within the countries studied.

The application: Building a strategic narrative framework

We translated the findings into a framework highlighting recurring themes in governance, gender, resilience, and aspiration. The work gave UNDP a more grounded understanding of youth sentiment and a stronger basis for communications and policy dialogue about the future. Its contribution was a way to organize and interpret the evidence across different contexts.

Explore our approach: Culture Mapping · Cultural Research & Intelligence