What the UN Summit of the Future Taught Us About Narrative Power
In a conference hall filled with world leaders, technocrats, and AI futurists, it wasn’t the keynote speeches that stayed with us. It was the stories.
Stories from grassroots organizations in Ghana, Brazil, Bangladesh — from communities tackling climate injustice, energy poverty, and social inequality not with billion-dollar budgets, but with strategy, courage, and lived expertise.
The biggest lesson from the UN Summit of the Future? The future isn’t being invented in Silicon Valley. It’s being built — every day — by communities.
Communities are already solving the future.
They just need the systems to support them.
We saw hundreds of grassroots initiatives offering real, scalable solutions to global challenges. Their common barrier? Not imagination. Not talent. Systems.
Governments often stand in the way of change — with bureaucracy, inertia, or outright suppression. What we need is not more top-down control, but bottom-up trust.
Support communities. Give them the resources. Get out of their way.
When it comes to AI, control is not a strategy.
A lot of the discussion at the Summit focused on controlling artificial intelligence — its risks, its potential for abuse, its implications for democracy.
But here’s the question we raised in one of the dialogues: Is control really the answer? Or just a comfortable illusion?
You don’t counter disruptive tech by fencing it in. You do it by embedding democratic values, public oversight, and diverse voices at the start of the process — not after the damage is done.
AI governance can’t just be a reaction. It has to be a vision.
Whose future are we building?
One of the boldest ideas presented was the UN’s Pact for the Future, introduced by the secretary general António Guterres — a call to look beyond the immediate crises and imagine a new system of global governance that can actually prevent them.
But we challenged the room with a reminder: Futures must be decolonized to be legitimate.
The Summit showcased inspiring voices from the Global South — but vast regions like Eastern Europe, including Belarus and Ukraine, remain on the fringes. Still treated as buffer zones or battlegrounds, not active participants in shaping global futures.
Decolonizing the future means shifting power — not just representation. It means confronting whose stories get told, whose crises get named, whose solutions get funded.
The next narrative isn’t written in capitals. It’s co-authored across communities.
If we want a future that works — for climate, for justice, for peace — we need to stop asking who’s in charge, and start asking: Who’s already leading — and what do they need to lead more?
At StratComLab, we help movements, cities, and civic innovators take control of the story — and scale the solutions they’re already building.
Because the future doesn’t need to be invented. It needs to be amplified.
