The past few decades have seen a global revolution in how people access, consume, and share information. New challenges and opportunities brought about by these transformations now intersect with longer-standing challenges to media pluralism, freedom, and independence.

Media systems play a greater and more significant role in the lives of an ever-larger number of people, shaping their perspectives and outlook on private and public matters. This reach and impact offer an unprecedented opportunity to bring about positive social change. Still, it also comes with significant risks to social cohesion and the quality of public decision-making, among other things. Therefore, all relevant stakeholders—media actors themselves, policymakers, the international community, etc.—must ensure that the media’s enormous potential is harnessed to promote democratic governance, sustainable development, and peace.

For a long time, UNDP has played a central role in engaging the media to support governance, sustainable development, and peace. UNDP’s media-related initiatives can be classed under three broad and interconnected areas of engagement (i) promoting enabling environments— normative, legal, and regulatory—conducive to free and professional media; (ii) leveraging the potential of media outlets to be actors for peace and development; and (iii) developing the capacities of social actors and governments to use media channels to achieve specific development aims. These three areas of engagement encompass UNDP’s ability and potential to work holistically with a range of actors and institutions in support of the media’s role in governance, sustainable development, and peace. UNDP media-related activities span an extensive range of programmatic areas, covering themes as diverse as the accountability and responsiveness of state institutions, environmental issues, climate change, and gender equality, to mention only a few. One of UNDP’s clear strengths and comparative advantages in working with the media is its ability to engage on a broad range of key development challenges aligned with its expertise and mandate, whether on issues of good governance, peacebuilding, SDG implementation, or equality and inclusion.