The Beyonds Festival 2026 to Convene Global Voices on Sustainable Development Beyond 2030  

As global conversations begin to look beyond the 2030 Agenda, the Beyond Lab at the United Nations Office at Geneva is thrilled to be hosting  The Beyonds Festival 2026, a three-day international event culminating the Beyonds Challenge initiative launched by the Lab in 2026.
The initiative is a collaboration between the Beyond Lab, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), through Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), OneXplore, the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation (BCAF), the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), and Another Narrative. 

Taking place from 5 to 7 October 2026 at the Palais des Nations, the Festival will bring together youth, policymakers, artists, researchers, international organizations, philanthropy, civil society and the private sector to exchange ideas, build partnerships and explore practical pathways towards long-term, regenerative and inclusive futures beyond 2030. 

The Beyonds Challenge: Looking beyond 2030

In recent years, the global landscape has been shaped by overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises, including climate change, geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty, and growing social fragmentation.  

Against this backdrop, imagining long-term futures that are aspirational, inclusive, and transformative rather than merely reactive has been increasingly struggling. When public discourse becomes dominated by crisis containment, the capacity to envision alternative development pathways weakens, and future-oriented thinking is replaced by a sense of constraint and inevitability.   

This erosion of collective imagination has significant implications for sustainable development beyond 2030. Long-term transitions require not only technical solutions and policy frameworks, but also shared, participatory narratives that allow people to see themselves as active contributors to shaping the future. 

This is the reason why the Beyond Lab launched in the past year the Beyonds Challenge, to create a structured yet participatory, intergenerational and global platformfor reflection on possible futures and long-term participatory thinking.  

The objective of the Beyonds Challenge was really this: restoring imaginative agency and reconnecting individuals and communities with the idea that different actions taken today can lead to the future of sustainable development beyond 2030.

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The Beyonds Festival: from global ideas to collective action

The Beyonds Challenge was launched by the Beyond Lab at UN Geneva as a global, participatory competition to gather diverse interpretations on the key elements of development beyond 2030 in a cross-generational, cross-geographical, and cross-disciplinary way.

The Challenge generated a large and diverse evidence base for understanding how people across regions, generations, and disciplines are thinking about long-term sustainability and societal transformation, with hundreds of submissions from more than 90 countries. 

The Beyond Lab is thrilled to be hosting The Beyonds Festival 2026, a three-day international event culminating the Beyonds Challenge initiative. Taking place from 5 to 7 October 2026 at the Palais des Nations, the Festival will bring together youth winners from the challenge, policymakers, artists, researchers, international organizations, philanthropy, civil society and the private sector to exchange ideas, build partnerships and explore practical pathways towards long-term, regenerative and inclusive futures beyond 2030. 

The Festival also contributes to broader intergenerational dialogue across the United Nations ecosystem, creating opportunities for exchange that complement ongoing discussions leading towards the UN Global Youth Townhall organized by the United Nations Youth Office later this year as well as the intergovernmental processes on Beyond 2030 to begin at the SDG Summit in September 20207. 

Further details on the programme, participating speakers and the selected Beyonds Challenge projects will be announced in the coming weeks... stay tuned!