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Sustainable development goals are used as a guidance for strategies development on local, regional and national levels. The importance of including young people in this complex process is recognized in all relevant documents (i.e. Agenda 21), however it is not an easy task to elicit opinions and preferences from the youth. Furthermore, the assessment of the sustainable development goals itself presents a challenge for the noisy data and nonlinear relationships in data. Popular approach is fuzzy set models where expert knowledge is presented with comprehensible rules; however expert knowledge elicitation takes a long time too. Several studies proposed an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system approach that combines the fuzzy set theory to model expert knowledge with neural networks for inferring rules and membership functions from data to assess the sustainable development performance. We base our assumptions that ANFIS can be used to predict the importance of sustainable development pillars from the demographic data of young people. For this purpose, we have conducted an online survey on sustainable development goals opinions and importance of young people in Serbia. The sample of 386 respondents has been split into a training sample of 300 instances (to generate membership functions and fuzzy rules) and a testing sample of 86 instances to predict the importance of the three pillars. We have conducted a trace-driven simulation test to validate the results of the proposed ANFIS model. Results of the study provided insights into how the young people in Serbia assess the importance of sustainable development goals. Secondly, the results suggest that ANFIS can be applied to predict values of importance of the three sustainable development pillars with the relative error of Rel Err LT 5%. It must be noted that the considered model could be further improved by using training samples with more data.

The whole world adopted a global strategy as the only possible one a global development strategy based on the principles of sustainability. This strategy includes not only all types of politics, economies and societies, but is also an integral part of life and wellbeing of all people. A new sustainable development agenda for the period 2015-2030 identifies youth not only as a category much more sensitive to sustainability, but in each of its 17 goals of sustainable development emphasizes the role of young people and the need for their active participation in the promotion and realization of these objectives and its targets. Bearing this in mind, the research presented in the paper deals with young people's knowledge on sustainable development, the strategy of sustainable development, and their attitudes towards the goals of sustainable development in the context of what they themselves find most important. Obtained results in the case study of the Republic of Serbia, not only show the results of the analysis of young people's viewpoints on these crucial issues but also of a good way to continue research in this area not only by the authors of the paper but other researchers who are engaged in activism and participation of youth in sustainable development as well.

During the period from 2007 to 2014, and in addition to huge institutional changes, large steps were taken in the field of youth policy in the Republic of Serbia in order to create national resources which would have influence on the improvement of the youth status and life. On the other hand, the practice shows that the existence of the national framework for youth support, as a local service network intended for youths, is not a crucial prerequisite to change the current situation when it comes to improving the quality of life of young people, but that the existence of the critical level of youth activism is a key driving force that leads to changes. This paper presents an overview of the level of youth activism in the city of Belgrade. The results show that young people accept a proactive attitude to life when it comes to their personal or family problems and issues whilst the engagement in the social field and especially a political one are not seen as a preferable type of behaviour.