First Partispace public report
Standing of youth policy and participation in Europe today
Since the publication of the European Commission’s White Paper on Youth in 2001, the attention on youth has grown in the political agendas of many European countries. This is demonstrated by the increasing proliferation of discourses on youth and policies for their social integration.
Political discourses and policies convey specific perspectives on young people’s role in society, their needs and potentials as active citizens, and how these are translated into concrete ambitions and directed measures. To understand the content and inter-relations between the views on young people in different European countries a comparative analysis of policies and discourses on youth and youth participation in the eight PARTIspace countries have been carried out. Together with an exploration of youth conditions based on the analysis of Eurostat data and a review of the most recent literature on youth participation and descriptions of the cities involved, this provides a framework for the in-depth analyses of participation in the coming local case studies.
In the now published WP2 comparative report the “images of youth” in the different countries are proposed. These images are built up from which youth issues are prioritised and what solutions are suggested and/or implemented, paying specific attention to the topic of youth participation.
The main results of these analyses show how the eight countries of PARTISPACE consortium (Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK) reflect different youth perception and consequently different youth transition regimes and policies.
The discourse analyses of about 30 official documents on youth (e.g. policies and official governmental statements) and also the comparative exploration of the youth policy systems in the involved countries highlight both commonalities and national variations.
The main findings suggest that despite the aforementioned proliferation of discourses and policies, in many of the countries youth policy and participation occupy a scarcely defined and prioritised place in the national agendas.
