Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to UNDER 30, the podcast series by the EU-Council of Europe youth partnership that brings research results, explores trends in young people's lives and themes relevant for youth policy and practice.
The EU-CoE youth partnership is a co-operation programme between the European Commission and the Council of Europe in the field of youth, created in 1998, connecting youth research, policy and practice.
Youth participation and shrinking civic space
===
[00:00:00]
Dariusz: Hello. UNDER 30 is back with a new episode, exploring how young people shape democracy, participate in decision making and navigate today's shrinking civic space.
In our conversation today, I'm joined by Ana, Carlotta, Gilda and Lana to reflect on youth participation research and tools that support youth civil society in Europe and beyond. My name is Dariusz Grzemny, and UNDER 30 is a podcast by the EU-Council of Europe Youth Partnership, exploring research results, trends in young people's lives and themes that matter for youth policy and practice.
It's very nice to have you here. We have quite a lot of people today on the podcast episode because the topic is very [00:01:00] big as well, and it's very, very wide because we'll talk about democracy, youth participation, shrinking civic space, tools, research a lot of things.
It's very difficult to contain it in 30 minutes, but we will try our best. So maybe we'll start with the introductions first.
Ana: Alright, hello and thank you for having us and having me at this podcast. So my name is Ana Mosiashvili. I work as a research and program manager at the European Partnership for Democracy. We have developed this Global Youth Participation Index. I will talk about it a bit more and later in the podcast but I'm the coordinator of this initiative and together with my colleague Carlotta we are involved in sister projects that is called WYDE initiative and Carlotta will also talk about it.
Dariusz: Thank you Ana. So Carlotta, are you a called by Ana. So maybe you continue.
Carlotta: There we go. I was put on the spot. Hi everyone. Thank you very much for having me and having EPD [00:02:00] here today. I'm Carlotta Magoga. I work at EPD, as research and programs officer. And,my expertiserelies On civic movements, social movements, and especially youth. And I manage a project that is called WYDE Freedoms, which we'll dig in a bit later. Thank you for having me.
Gilda: Hi everyone,and yes, thank you for having me here. My name is Gilda Isernia I'm a member of the PEYR, which is the Pool of European Youth Researchers. It's part of the wider sort of initiative and partnership on youth between the Council of Europe and European Commission. And, my sort of area of focus and expertise is youth participation, electoral politics and civic space, which is why I'm here to present the most recent study of the youth partnership on the topic of democracy and youth civic space. I come to the pool mostly as a practitioner, because I've been actively working in youth civil society for the last five years.
[00:03:00] thank you.
Dariusz: Thank you Gilda. Lana, you are not new here, but maybe you justrecall who you are.
Lana: Hi everyone, my name is Lana Pasic. I am a youth research and policy manager at the EU Council of Europe youth partnership and I coordinate the research and activities related to democracy, youth participation, civic space, also some other projects on mental health, et cetera. But really this focus on democracy and civic space is something that the youth Partnership has been exploring, for the last five years more closely.
But, also for the duration of our existence since 1998, it has been one of the key topics of our work.
Dariusz: Okay. Thank you. As I said at the beginning, we have quite a big topic today to discuss and also different tools that have been developed both by the partnership and also other organizations. So maybe let's start with the other organizations, let's start with [00:04:00] EPD.
Maybe you tell us a little bit, either Ana or Carlotta, I don't know which one of you would be better placed, but probably both of you, What is a EPD and what do you do on the topical youth participation? We already know that you developed the Global Participation Index. So maybe you can tell us also a little bit how it came about.
Carlotta: Okay. I will maybe start and pass the ball to Ana for the youth political participation index, 'cause she was in charge. The European Partnership for Democracy is a member based organization, which works on supporting democracy and fostering democracy globally, we have different approaches.
We work on policy, on research and on programs and their interconnected through the activities that we do. And when it comes to youth, we have, three maininitiatives that we're involved with. As you said, it was a wide topic. It is a wide topic and it is a WYDE project. It's the program from the commission, it's called WYDE and it fosters [00:05:00] women, and youth political participation all over the world. And, in a WYDE, we lead the consortium on wider civic engagement, which has bothactivities on advocacy and research, has the Youth Democracy Cohort, which is a platform of more than 600 organizations. So youth-led organizations all over the world. And, we have the Young Researchers Network, which is a network of young researchers coming from all over the world. We have Freedoms, which is another project under WYDE initiative from the, European Commission, which is about promoting, protecting, and preparing civil society actors, which are youth-led or youth-focused, in 10 different countries. And in this case, we work a lot with informal movements too. And we have a project that is called Digitalized Youth, which is under the DDY initiative. So basically it works on the Sahel region and on the neighborhood regionswith the youth activists on [00:06:00] digital rights and digital inclusion and digital political participation. And, under the WYDE project, I didn't mention it, but Ana will talk now about the youth political participation index, which is a big research product of the project.
Ana: Alright. so it is my pleasure to introduce the Global Youth Participation Index. It's a research tool that gathers and compares data across 141 countries around the globe. And, the index has four dimensions. These are socioeconomic context, political affairs, elections, and civic space.
It's also interesting, of course, to discuss civic space dimensions specifically, for today's podcast. So we gathered data across 41 variables for the index, for 141 countries, as I mentioned. So the idea was to, of course,make data on youth participation more accessible, because by now there are some, research databases and activities that [00:07:00] gathered the data on youth and democracy, but not as organized and not as,comprehensive,in a way.
So, the Global Youth Participation Index created sort of a precedent, and also on its own, it's a statement. Because nowadays we see that young people are more and more actively involved in global protests or also reclaiming spaces in a way, in, in formal politics or outside of formal politics.
And we see the importance of youth as the largest demography actually in the world to research what, what they think about politics, what they think about participation. And also often, some of the surveys that we see, different barometers and so on, they, they often focus on how do young people feel about, for example, elections? Are they lazy or more active to go and vote, right? So the most of the times focus is on young people and also a bit of like burden on. That youth have to figure it out, how to [00:08:00] participate. While what we realized while working on the index is thatthe political, like traditional political settings are often very inaccessible for young people.
There are lots of barriers that young people face, and it's quite difficult to get into that space. This was basically the main objective of the index, to make the data accessible, of course, to have more evidence-based advocacy based on the data that we gathered through the index. And, in the following parts, I'll also talk about the trends that [inaudible].
Dariusz: Yes. Thank you. Thank you for this introduction. Lana, you want to add something?
Lana: Yeah. just actually to follow up on what Ana said, because, absolutely we have, also similar experiences in terms of our research on youth participation, where we know that from the data that young people do participate. They want to participate, they want to be involved in policy making, decision making, [00:09:00] but we also know that some of these external factors do influence their ability to participate or how welcome they are within the spaces where decisions are made. And this is exactly one of the reasons why we have been following up on this project, on this research because we did the similar research in 2021 during COVID, and then, 24, 25, survey that we did kind of added a bit more information on this. SoI Don't know if Gilda wants to maybe introduce a bit what we did during the last survey and the study that is now upcoming.
Gilda: Yeah, sure, of course. and yeah, indeed, like there is, let's say,a trend in research on young people that can feel quite essentializing, right? So the idea that sort of like the power, sort of the agents solely relies on young people's initiativewhereas the reason why I was drawn to this project also as a civil [00:10:00] society worker, let's say, and a youth civil society worker is exactly because it aims to compliment a little bit, sort of the view from the youth as an essential category. And it goes to like, investigate, let's say the spaces where youth rights can be upheld and can be used. And this was a bit also the spirit, the approach that we had in this research project, which, as Lana has mentioned already, it's the latest in a series, which means that we have kept more or less the data collection methods similar so that we could compare the sort of evolution and the trends over time when it comes to youth civic space. And the study really aims to support the youth partnership efforts in protecting and sustaining civic space for young people, which is part, again, of like this wider efforts to, to revitalize and to support and to defend young people and more especially in their democratic and political rights. One thing that I [00:11:00] wanted maybe to mention about this research, because as Lana mentioned, it's the latest in a series,and there was a study in 2021, But the original idea for the survey and for this, monitoring of civic space actually comes from the youth forum. So the European Youth Forum has done the first study in 2019. and I think this is actually like a very good example of like how institutions can, be reactive and can, sort of take on, good practices coming from youth civil society and use their means, and their expertise also to, to support this. Maybe just quickly about the research is that data collection has happened more like the end of 2024. In the beginning of 2025. It was a mixed methodology research. So we had a part of desk research and policy research. There was a survey of youth organizations, which I think was really the core of this report, but also of previous reports.
And then we complimented [00:12:00] the survey with 10 expert interviews with participants coming from various European contexts. And this sort of like crossing of methods really sort of allowed us to makea snapshot, a landscape of the state of youth rights, right now in, Europe.
Dariusz: I think we know what the research is about but we still don't know what's in it, so I think there will be time to actually explore it a little bit. So since young people participate and they want to participate, as we all know, and we say, and there's a lot of studies that actually confirmed it.
Ana, what are the strengths in youth participation according to the tool that you've developed? And, maybe also connecting it to the topic of the research as well. Where do you see the challenges when it comes to civic space for young people or for participation of young people?
Ana: Yeah. Thank you so much for this question. I mean, of course a lot of different studies have showed to us that young people [00:13:00] do want to participate and if certain groups of young people don't want to participate it is not because they areyou know, they have this apathy or they are not interested.
It's because it's very difficult to participate. So of course there is also this intersectional layer on it that it might be even more challenging for certain groups to access. For example, information access to internet nowadays is very important oraccess to jobs, state jobs, or other public jobs and so on. What we saw as a result of ourdata gathering and the index is that political affairs, it's one of the dimensions, right? Political affairs got the lowest score, lowest average score for all countries that were assessed for the index. And in many countries the political affairs or the election scores are lower than civic space course, and that indicates, points out, something that sometimes when the political [00:14:00] space, or the elections are closed for young people and youth participation young people find alternative ways, and those alternative ways could be the civic space because we see that civic space tends to be more open, more welcoming. We could also say more youth friendly because of the nature of the civil society organizations that they operate or the tools that they use. They're more welcoming, and create more youth friendly environment for young people. So if we look at the, the data in most of the countries civic space dimensions scores higher than political affairs and elections. In about 40 countries where civic space is lower than the other two, not talking about socioeconomic context, it is noticeable that these countries have more autocratic regimes where civic space is very closed, restricted, and young people also don't really have any space in there [00:15:00] either. And that's why then young people are, you know, more focused on political affairs and elections and trying to express their opinions about politics this way. So these are sort of like the main findings.
Ana: But obviously what we see is that civic space is increasingly challenged, and there are morebarriers nowadays also created for the CSOs themselves. For example, the restrictive laws, and that means that the space that was, more or less open and more accessible for young people is going to be also closed than what we call, shrinking civic space, right. It continues to shrink, unfortunately.
Carlotta: I'm not gonna be repetitive in the sense that yes, young people are willing to be part ofpolitical decisions and policymaking. We know that. And, the civic space, from the index show that actually young people find their ways to be included in decision making somehow.
And, I think the biggest issues, if we talk [00:16:00] about trends and general trends, and I'm gonna get more, bit more detailed, but is the fact that youth is labeled as youth all the time. And I think this makesgeneral community and the civil society and the institutions giving a lot of credibility to what youth can say and have to say at the same level as other actors. So I think that's the main issue that is generally speaking in all the countries, um, and at different levels. And then if we check on civic space and we see the different trends, this is confirmed because young people are mobilizing, young people are trying to build new initiatives in the gaps that are existingin the traditional setting of political participation. So we see protests, massive protests happening in different countries and also transnational protests happening, for issues that are happening [00:17:00] around the world, especially when it comes to conflict.
The main three trends that we see doing research with the activists and with young activists in different countries are related to digital, to informality and to doing activism in exile. So I think that at the moment, these are the three trends that we drone from our research.
Digital, because not having a formal space to mobilize, bring people on platform online, and this gets movement and initiative also transnational more easily. So youth are very powerful in using digital, but again digital repression is still there. So they're finding a very interesting new ways to fight this kind of repression.
But, it's still there. And then doing activism on exile, which is another big trend because a lot of activists that we work with had to move and mainly we work when it comes to public events or public initiatives with the diaspora. [00:18:00] And this is something that has been tackled a lot by autocratic governments lately in the past few years because it's very powerful.
So there's transnational repression happening more and more around the world, and youth is very much,affected by this kind of repression, especially because of lacking ofskills,lacking of,capacities, lacking of spaces lacking of help. And, going to the third trend, I could talk for hours.
So sorry if I'm cutting myself a bit, to stay in the times. But for the third trend, which is I think the most important that I mentioned at the beginning. It's the shift to informality. So we see these new initiatives that build on ideas that are very practical and local based, but they resonate globally and they manage to mobilize people all around the world.
Dariusz: Thank you, Gilda coming to the research. I had a look at it, and it's not very [00:19:00] optimistic.When you look at the results, especially comparing it to previous researches that you were talking about, the situation doesn't look good. So can you tell us about the indicators of shrinking civil spacethat you highlight in the study?
Gilda: Right. Of course, of course. Yeah, you're right. It's not the most optimistic of findings. And this is why I'm happy to be here also with colleagues from EPD because I think it's important to like situate, right? Like our finding within, of course, like a much bigger let's say topic, which is youth political participation of which civic space is one aspect. That of course is like, let's say in many ways it's both a symptom and a cause of many different trends that have been brewing, let's say in the last years and in the last decade. And maybe before I go on to the indicators, I just might mention them very quickly because I think it compliments quite nicely with what Carlotta was mentioning.
So, you know, before we went on the ground to [00:20:00] ask youth organizations, their experience of inhabiting civic space, we also did quite a bit of research in terms of like the literature on civic space and the latest general trends. We sort of, saw that there is a general global trend of democratic back sliding, which I think Ana also mentioned before,which has obviously an impact on fundamental rights, both locally so nationally and but also transnationally. And within this trend of democratic back sliding, which can really be understood as an internal erosion of democratic norms, let's say spearheaded by specific authoritarian governments, authoritarian figures. Within this democratic back sliding trend we also have the sort of the role of digitalization, which of course had as, Carlotta was saying a wholemobilizing potential and a whole platform potential. But it also had, like, it was a [00:21:00] bit of a, let's say a double side, no knife. I dunno if you say it like that, but, you know, it has its positive and it's negatives. So you have the potential, of course, for surveillance, and, and also when it comes more onto social media, the rise of misinformation and desinformation , and these legacy of sort of let's say the dark side of digitalization
we've seen, or at least it's obvious from the literature, it's very much connected to the aftermath of COVID-19, which was really identified as a catalyzer for this downward trend in civic space that we still see today. Which brings me to the indicators that we've used, you know, on the basis of, of this research
on the general trends, there was, I would say, three main spheres on which we focused when it comes to the indicators of the shrinking of civic space. The first one was meaningful youth participation and in particular the ability of youth organization to [00:22:00] participate in political decision making, but also the effectiveness of disengagement.
The impact, not just on the policies, but also on the youth organizations sort of participating in this process, which of course it can be good impact, but we can see also that there are sides of impact, let's say, that are maybe more connected to the fear of repression, the fear of retribution, the fear of speaking out. And of course this is connected also to the second, set of indicators, which is more closely connected to the dimensions of civic space. So this is maybe less specifically about the youth field. It's more widely about civic space. But of course, young people have to confront themselves, let's say, or like they make use of the same rights as other actors within civic space.
So it also applies to them. And these dimensions are notably freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and access [00:23:00] to information. And so this is like the second set of indicators on which we've built our data gathering methods and on which of course the report is based. And sort of overlapping these two categories or sort of what emerges very concretely from these categories are two main indicators of shrinking civic space.
One of them is the funding that is available for youth organization. Or the lack of funding. This we've seen, especially in the last year, how many donors, how many actors have actually withdrawn funding or have stopped or reduced their funding, which of course creates many challenges for youth organization in the case in which they are
dependent, either partly or fully from the funding of institutions, philanthropic institutions, non-government institutions, also government and sort of public, public money. Right? And then the second one, the second sort of big concrete factor in the shrinking of civic space for youth is legislation. So the use [00:24:00] of legislation, which sort of connects again to what I was mentioning before about democratic backsliding. So the idea that you can pass laws in a more or less democratic way, but which, sort of, directly influence the ability of young people to make use of their fundamental rights.
I can think, for example, this last year of quite a few bans on demonstration this again, this, flippant use of bans on demonstration can also be seen as a legacy of COVID-19. And also, sort of repercussions for speaking out maybe in the forms of lawsuits for defamation.
These are two sort of top examples that I can get on top of my head, but indeed, you are right. The trend that we see emerging of the findings is a dramatic downward trend, even compared to the numbers that we got during COVID, which for me signals thatthings need to get a little bit worse before they can get better if it makes [00:25:00] sense.
Lana: I would say given the reality of the shrinking civic space that we know from the research and also the challenges that Ana and Otta have identified, and Gilda as well, what would you say is the role of the youth sector and particularly we are speaking of the European sector in being able to address some of these issues regarding civic space, what are the possibilities, let's say, for youth organizations, youth workers to support young people in functioning at the times of challenges for their participation? And perhaps, in this case, maybe Gilda, you can start to speak a little bit about the tool that we are working on in terms of supporting youth workers and youth organizations.
Gilda: Yeah, of course. And, maybe I'll try to keep a little bit slimmer this time. yes [00:26:00] indeed. So, of course, again as a person comingfrom youth organization and student unions in particular, like for me the ideal sort of support of civil society comes from institutions and governments, right?
So the idea that sort of complementing what we were saying before, responsibility for broadening and opening civic space is something that rests on those who have the most power in these spaces. And this is the first sort of like opening But then of course, like young people, youth organization, the youth sector as a whole needs to, sort of build its capacity to be ready for the further shrinking that we see coming. And this one was a bit the spirit of the tool that we put together with another researchers, a tool for youth organizations to sort of navigate and learn about civic space. And the idea is that with this tool we wanted to make something that, all [00:27:00] youth organizations, regardless of their context and operational environment they could relate to and that they could use to see civic space as an area of intervention itself. So not just a space that you use to, you know, advance your advocacy or to make your voice heard, but also a space that deserves its own attention.
And so to make it tangible and to make it actionable. And the way it wants to do that, it wants to do it by enabling collective reflection and discussion within youth organization on what are their main challenges when it comes to civic space, but also what are the main opportunities. And, just quickly on how it's built, it's really a list of very simple statements.
So statements, really phrased in a very accessible language, which is also we've seen a challenge when it comes to civic space. A lot of young people who are active in civic space don't necessarily know what civic space is, right. So, we,Sort of, we've made a lot of [00:28:00] effort to make maybe more technical terms, more academic terms, really accessible to people on the ground and to young people in particular to relate them to their day-to-day experience of running a youth organization and of being youth activist. And the idea is that it enables collective reflection through the discussion of a series of statements that tackle the dimensions that I've mentioned before, the same dimensions of the study so that youth organization can build a common understanding of what are the challenges and also potentially move forward on ideas on how to tackle these challenges.
Lana: Thank you, Gilda. Maybe just to add on my side it's a sort of addition to the series of work we are doing in this topic, which is really meant to serve as a capacity building tool for youth organizations, youth workers, and anybody else in the youth sector. Because once we identify clearly the problems or the issues, then it's of course easier [00:29:00] to do something about them and to address them. And then maybe moving on to Ana and Carlotta, in terms of the, you know, what can be done from the global youth participation index. You have identified a lot of trends that are maybe shrinking civic space, but I'm sure through the study and the research you have also identified some of the positive trends that, you know, open up the space or encourage youth participation and maybe the European youth sector can take inspiration from some of these trends.
So if you have any, if you would like to share them.
Ana: Sure. Thank you so much. I just wanted to say that in terms of what we need to do, right, to tackle these challenges and so on, I think having more research on this topic is already a positive step. And also realizing that there are different stakeholders and actors in the sector that also do amazing job in many different, you know, elements of youth [00:30:00] participation. I think uniting forces in a way, coming together, having a dialogue is also very important and youth partnership could play an important role in that. And I know that you already, you know, facilitate the research conference and policy dialogues and so on. So that's, that's also very important. And I would say that continuing these activitieswill be essential to bring all the stakeholders together and to find ways how to how to stop the shrinkingspace for civil society. As for the positive examples, which is beyond Europe, however, I think given that nowadays we face a lot of challenges in Europe, it could be a good example to replicate in Europe, the youth democracy cohort. So we mentioned that we have around 600 members all over the world and some organizations, grassroots organizations in different countries.
They're very actively involved. For example, with open government processes, OGP, if you have heard, and they're really like, [00:31:00] actively working on national election plans, doing advocacy. And then as EPD, as an organization that coordinates the youth democracy cohort, we support them with our capacity, you know.
We support with capacity building, we share policy tools and so on. So it's a global platform thatreally allows young people and youth organizations to take an active part in the policy processes, policymaking processes. And I think that's very important because sometimes, obviously research is very important and it's needed, but we also need real examples and real, sort of like processes that can result in reforms, in certain countries and so on. So I would say that replicating this, maybe not specifically European experiences in Europe could work and coming together also, I think sharing intergenerational dialogue is very important.
We are also working on this Youth Decide 2040 project with other European [00:32:00] organizations, for example, European Youth Forum is also part of the consortium. And what we try with this project is basicallycreating scenarios for democracy in 2040 Europe, how democracies will look like 15 years.
And we're doing this with, together with young people,andalso older generations. So creating this intergenerational platform to envision democracies for 2040. And I think it's a, it's an interesting methodology in a way, an interesting approach to, you know, jointly work for something that is very important for young people.
We hear a lot from the research that young people are more and more, voting for more like far right politicians and so on. But, we also need to understand the reasons, right? Why young people are behaving that perhaps because they are blocked out of the politics. And also example could be from our own research, the Global Youth Participation Index, that data on youth wings x the major political [00:33:00] parties in almost all the countries were missing. We don't have data on how young people are engaging with political parties and formal politics. I'm not talking about representation in parliaments and so on. That is more or less available, but for example, youth wings of the political parties that data was missing.
So we need to understand that this sort of interconnected root causes then result in something that is alarming. For that, we need to come together and exchange and dialogue to, to find the ways to tackle that.
Lana: From the side of the youth partnership, just to add that both our research on democracy and civic space and accompanying tool for youth organizations will be available for use in 2026. So we invite all youth sector stakeholders to have a look at the study and also all the youth organizations to start using the tool. And we hope is going to be very helpful for the whole [00:34:00] European youth sector.
Dariusz: Thank you for listening to UNDER 30 a podcast by the EU-Council of Europe Youth Partnership.
A big thank you to Ana, Carlotta, Gilda and Lana for sharing their insights and experience. And to you for staying with us in this conversation. If you want to learn more, check the episode notes for links to the Global Youth Participation Index and the youth partnership's work on democracy and civic space.
And stay tuned for the next episode of UNDER 30.