Keywords

1 Introduction

Youth work aimed at empowering people to be active citizens is demanding. For example, it is not easy to engage and motivate a target group of young people because they may not be aware of the benefits of using all of their citizen rights. Therefore, measures must be carefully crafted by a motivated team equipped with enough time and other resources. Youth work projects are further challenged by the specific contextual conditions they encounter. Reaching out to the target group can be difficult, for example, because of poor infrastructure in a given region. Furthermore, interregional disparities can lead to regionally differing perceptions of the EU, requiring different approaches to discussing EU-related matters. While the European Union strives to enhance the dialogue between politics and the youth everywhere, efforts to establish such a dialogue are thus faced with very diverse living conditions and EU perceptions. The “surge in disparities” caused by different crises in recent years is not only “one of the main causes for the current lack of popular support for the project to build the European Union” (Monfort 2020), it also makes efforts to regain support difficult.

To contribute to improving youth empowering projects in the EU and beyond, this chapter compares the practical challenges encountered by six projects in the post-socialist regions of the European Union. All of them were funded by Erasmus+ within the framework of the EU Youth Dialogue projects in 2019. It is not the aim to evaluate the overall project quality of these projects, which would require a different methodology.Footnote 1 Instead, this chapter systematises and compares mainly what project organisers themselves identify as challenges to youth projects and benefits from their expertise in their fields, their familiarity with the particular framework conditions in their region, and the practices of EU-related participatory youth projects. In almost all cases, these are people with long experience in youth work who can adequately assess the processes in their projects. Interviews with such experts are thus very valuable sources for the studies of Erasmus+ projects (Fennes and Gadinger 2021). In our case, they were interviewed as part of the Leipzig Jean Monnet Centre’s work from May to July, 2022.Footnote 2

This chapter first systematises the difficulties of implementing the youth dialogue project works that were mentioned by the project organisers.Footnote 3 It thereby identifies typical challenges described by the interviewees in the post-socialist regions. Next, the findings are interpreted in light of previous studies on youth work and European citizenship that did not specifically focus on our region of interest. The final section provides a brief summary and suggestions for further research.

2 Challenges to Youth Work as Reported by the Organisations

Table 1 summarises the main challenges to the youth dialogue projects that the interviewed persons, representatives of the project organisation teams, mentioned when asked about difficulties with their youth dialogue projects. The order reflects the sequence of mentioning the problems by the interviewees or the relevance that they paid to the issues in cases where they mentioned a ranking.

Table 1 Reported challenges for youth dialogue projects
Full size table

In short, the difficulties were related to the general infrastructure and youth work infrastructure, the project funding (amount, duration), the information concerning the EU programs, the target group (reachability, motivation), cooperation partners (schools, politicians/local officials, EU), and other practical challenges. However, the problems did not occur everywhere and in the same way. The table reveals that typical difficulties, mentioned independently by several project managing organisations, include an unstable or low or de facto not evenly accessible funding level, an unbalanced interest of a target group of young people in EU issues, and their unstable motivation. The access to funding and the unbalanced interest of a target group have a spatial dimension. With regard to funding, the NGOs in the post-socialist areas – in contrast to West-European NGOs – often do not dispose of many of their own resources and thus depend on external funding. With regard to interest and motivation, young people in the post-socialist areas are embedded in societies which are not characterised by strong EU enthusiasm, which might influence their willingness to participate.

Some challenges were mentioned by some, but not all interviewees, e.g. the restraint of public officials to cooperate or to take the discussed topics seriously, and infrastructural shortcomings or long distances to cities where EU information is provided and where EU-related events take place much more frequently. These difficulties do also have a spatial dimension. The restraint to cooperate with EU-related civil society organisations might be connected to attitudes and the culture especially outside the large centres of the region, but this cannot be substantiated on the basis of the available data. Likewise, infrastructural shortcomings do not exist everywhere in post-socialist areas but in some remote rural regions. This means that when planning youth work aimed at empowering people, it is necessary to differentiate within the post-socialist areas.

The following section discusses some of the challenging context conditions and difficulties for project planning and implementation mentioned by the interviewees in greater detail. It also deals with some difficulties that were evident from the interviewees’ accounts of their projects, but which were not explicitly identified by them as “problems” when asked about them (and therefore are not named in Table 1). Often it was precisely the difficult context conditions that motivated the project managers to organise and conduct the project with the aim of improving the situation.

2.1 Attitudes Towards the EU

People’s attitudes toward the EU and EU citizenship vary across the cases, and this might influence how people feel about EU-related projects. The Czech population’s support for EU membership is generally low. In Hungary, attitudes towards the EU are fairly positive, but the interviewee reported that EU funds not related to infrastructure projects were met with skepticism. Since the presented participation projects were all financed by EU funds and/or were related to the EU in terms of content, there was a general skepticism among the population about these projects.

Often EU-related attitudes also vary across countries; e.g. in Latvia or Poland young people tend to view the EU more positively than the general population. And yet, the reports on the context conditions of the youth dialogue projects reveal that a substantial share of young people supports parties which use an EU critical rhetoric, at least occasionally. Interviewees repeatedly mentioned that young people consider the EU as something far away and that EU level actors would not be their first choice if they could choose their dialogue partners. This is not the best precondition for EU-related projects.

2.2 Low Interest in Politics

Like attitudes toward the EU, the population’s relationship to politics in general varies by region and country. The reports on the context conditions of the youth dialogue projects reveal that young people in the post-socialist areas often show a low level of political participation and interest, and that political interest can be socially biased. In the Czech Republic, it was mentioned that people generally perceive politics as something negative. This in turn had a negative impact on the outreach of the Decide on Europe project. Many principals or teachers of the invited schools, especially in rural areas, refused to participate in the project because they suspected a political agenda behind the organisation and assumed the project would pursue specific political goals. For this reason, many students, especially in the Czech Republic, could not be reached and informed about the EU, and their views on EU issues could not be dealt with.

This example shows that cooperation between actors in the field of political education and political decision-makers, as a key aim of youth dialogue projects, can be prevented by having an environment where politics is not well-perceived. While not all schools refused to cooperate, it needed more time to put them into action, and the prospect for reaching out to those who are not interested in politics is much weaker than elsewhere.

2.3 Challenging Living Conditions in Remote Rural Areas

The reports mention an increased exodus of young people in many regions across East Central Europe. As particularly highlighted by interviewees in Latvia and Poland, young people are moving to larger cities or abroad for training, studies, or in search of work as they do not see future prospects for themselves in rural regions due to a lack of jobs, a poorly developed infrastructure, and few youth work opportunities. While in general, the rural youth is more susceptible to unemployment in Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary (Eurostat 2017), the overall unemployment is not very high in the rural regions because of the out-migration. In fact, unemployment as such was only mentioned as a problem by the interviewees for the south-eastern regions of Hungary and Slovakia.

The interviewees of the project The Best Is Yet to Come and (Un)Attractive reported that people are less satisfied with their lives in rural areas than in the more centrally located districts of their country (Latvia and Hungary). The Hungarian interviewee emphasised that this is especially true for remote rural areas (and not all rural areas in general), where people are more concerned with coping with basic everyday problems than issues like EU citizenship. Poor economic circumstances and dissatisfaction with living conditions are in many cases accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness. For this reason, young people in particular might not easily be motivated to participate as citizens because they have the feeling that nothing will change despite their involvement. Thus, to give them a feeling of being heard and to empower them was both a motivation as well as an obstacle for several projects.

2.4 Underdeveloped Youth Work in Remote Rural Areas

Many interviews revealed that the youth dialogue projects are challenged by the generally poor position of social work in the individual countries. The interviewee for the Czech and Slovak youth dialogues reported a reluctance to cooperate, especially from vocational schools in rural areas. In Poland, youth work usually means “underground work”, as can be seen from the report on the Mińsk Youth Forum. The interviewee for the Hungarian project (un)Attractive? II for example, argued that the commitment of individual project partners in the communities of remote rural areas was low for social projects and youth work and that there is often a lack of facilities for the youth to meet in these regions. In addition, youth dialogue projects and youth work in general are severely underfunded in Hungary. Under these conditions, it is much more difficult to reach out for participants and to stimulate sustainable participation and youth involvement in local affairs.

2.5 Difficulties in Reaching the Target Group

In order to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the EU across borders, it is necessary that as many people as possible learn about participation opportunities. Youth dialogue projects can offer an opportunity to do this if they manage to reach many participants. In practice, however, usually only a smaller part of the youth felt addressed by projects which included a longer engagement, even though the participation in single events was higher. Those who participated with more interest were often already interested in EU issues or engaged in other respective projects. For example, the interviewees from the projects in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia reported that EU-related projects tended to involve students and young people who already had a lot of knowledge about the EU and their participation opportunities. Reaching out to a broader number of participants in rural areas was also difficult because of poor infrastructure, which made it difficult to find common time slots for activities in Hungary, for example.

For some formats of youth dialogue, especially those with a more trans-European or international character, a good command of foreign languages is a prerequisite. Language courses and especially English skills, however, are often less developed in rural regions. The lack of language skills makes it difficult for young people to express themselves in the projects, which ultimately hinders their participation. Therefore, some interviewees, like in the Hungarian case, stick to basic-level EU-related projects that are limited to the local level and do not entail interaction with other actors outside the country for remote rural areas, although they are experienced also in conducting international projects in other regions. Several interviewees declared that for better outreach to a target group of people with low knowledge, the EU should give more support. The initiators of the EYW 2019 Kielce demanded help with social media measures and appealing program-related websites with simple instructions.

2.6 Unstable Motivation of Young People

The project interviews reveal that the project organisations did not always involve the target group in the planning and implementation of the projects because they could not count on young people being constantly motivated from the start until the end of a youth dialogue project. Several interviewees, e.g. in the East German case, argued that it is difficult to involve young people in the long term, as they are often busy with various other (life) problems and have little capacity for involvement. In most projects, the young people were able to influence the topics of the discussions and come up with their own thoughts about their region. However, they did not engage in planning the regional projects.

Only in the Minsk Youth Forum (Poland) and The Best Is Yet to Come (Latvia) projects were young people explicitly involved in the whole planning process. In the European Youth Week project in Kielce (Poland), young people were explicitly involved in the last phase of the dialogues. As the interviewee himself noted, this reduced the opportunity for young people to assume personal responsibility and expand their participation skills. Even though the reason for not including the target group is plausible, it can result in an “inauthentic” collaboration, as described in the report on the Minsk Youth Forum. The biggest problem in this case was that the suggestions made by the young people, according to their perception, did not carry any weight and were not taken seriously enough.

2.7 Lack of Prior Knowledge

The interviewees suggested that in the rural regions of all countries there is a lack of knowledge about the EU, about participation opportunities at the EU level, and especially about funding opportunities. This limits the options for project contents and formats because many advanced and more interesting formats, such as simulations or discussions with EU politicians, require a higher level of knowledge. Several projects, like the German Experiencing and Understanding Europe, tackled the problem by doing groundwork and conducting their workshops mainly to inform about the EU. Likewise, the project Decide on Europe wanted to inform the participants primarily about the EU and EU decision-making processes.

Other projects tackled the problem of a lack of EU-related knowledge (or maybe also interest) by focusing on local issues. This was, for example, the case for The Best Is Yet to Come from the Latvian organisation Lauku Forum, which concentrated on topics of rural development in Europe. Through capacity building processes, young people were able to increase their knowledge of rural development during the project by sharing ideas with their peers in their own country and in other EU countries. In the Czech and Slovak project, it was also argued that speaking about local issues can be a starting point, also for illustrating entanglements with the European Union.

2.8 No Systematic Consideration of the Youth Dialogue Results by Decision-Makers

As already mentioned, political decision-makers and officials were not always very open to the projects, especially with regard to agreeing on binding results and policy recommendations. This is probably why five of the six projects did not plan in advance any concrete consequences that should result from the youth dialogues for political decision-making processes. In the projects EYW Kielce, Mińsk Youth Forum and (un)Attractive? II, young people entered into dialogue with local decision-makers, and there were some attempts to summarise the conclusions and recommendations from the debates. EU politicians participated in the three-day meeting within the project Decide on Europe in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. However, the focus of this meeting was to show the participating young people how the EU works and what it is like to be an EU politician for a day. Written conclusions summarising concrete measures to induce political changes were not available.

Only the international project The Best Is Yet to Come conducted by the Latvian organisation prepared a final declaration that was presented in Brussels and was said to have impressed the politicians there. Further information on the implementation of the demands, however, is not publicly available. As noted in the report of the project Mińsk Youth Forum, the formulation of policy demands and suggestions during the youth dialogue events does not automatically result in their implementation. To improve this, the intercultural development foundation EBU calls for specific EU strategy papers on youth participation at the local level. The interviewee of the Hungarian project additionally suggested that the EU should appeal to the municipalities and national governments to give youth participation a higher priority.

2.9 Unclear Long-Term Effects

Another problem that arises for projects is the frequent lack of visible, long-term effects. Many interviewees argued that in order to signal to young people that the decision-makers are actually interested in their needs, youth dialogues need to have a continuous basis and not be one-time events. In line with previous studies, this suggests that they need to be integrated into existing local structures and regular youth work (see p. 9 to 13 in Tham 2007). However, even if there were concrete agreements on local partnerships between the project organisers and the local government, this did not guarantee that the project idea would be continued. The experience from the Hungarian project (un)Attractive? II reveals that despite the close cooperation between the local structures and the organisation, only one out of five projects was continued after the project.

The different demands of decision-makers and young people can impede the planning of longer-term cooperation. Due to their various tasks and busy schedules, decision-makers need dates that can be planned for the long term. By contrast, young people have difficulties maintaining motivation for a project over a longer period of time. Tasks involving long-term planning, such as transforming ideas into strategy papers and implementation programs, are sometimes very demanding and quickly seem unattractive to young people. Since the participation formats were mostly only project-related, contacts between the participants and within the organising team also quickly broke down, which lowered the motivation for renewed, long-term collaboration.

The lack of lasting contacts between the project participants might also be related to the fact that despite their considerable time commitment the young people participated mainly on a voluntary basis and were not remunerated. This was shown by the long-term evaluation of the project The Best Is Yet to Come. However, several interviewees highlighted the fact that participants in the project learned a lot and received jobs in which they could apply their qualifications. So while the project might not be the basis for a permanent structured dialogue between young people and officials and decision-makers, knowledge building and training can have a lasting character, even if this is less visible.

2.10 Funding

All the project organisers interviewed assessed the EU funding scheme very positively but mentioned problems with funding. The difficulties around funding are not simply related to the amount of money beneficiaries received from the EU, although in some cases funding was perceived as too low. Besides, the interviews revealed that the financial background varies considerably across the projects. If organisations are close to a local municipality or state and receive support from them in terms of accommodation or personnel, they apply only for additional resources. The two projects in Poland received the smallest amount of funding compared to the others, and it was used exclusively for the implementation of the projects, not for the maintenance of the organisation, the financing of permanent staff, or the establishment of sustainable structures. This was also true for the East German project, whose organiser is supported by the city of Leipzig and other public authorities. In contrast, the interviewed organisation in Hungary does not receive national funding because, according to the organisation, the approval of funds depends on the issues and political views of the applicants. Therefore, it focuses on EU funding, which covers almost its entire annual budget, including staff, materials, and expert fees.

More often than a low budget, the interviewees mentioned the de facto uneven access to the funding for different groups of people and different regions although it is in principle open to all. They argued that while the EU funding application process is, for experienced organisations, transparent and rather simple, organisations in rural regions have difficulties in getting in touch with EU actors and applying for funding. Especially for young people and other persons without longer experience with EU projects, the system is perceived as too slow and confusing. All interviewees declared that there is little knowledge about funding opportunities and application procedures. In order to inform more people about the funding opportunities, more mobile representatives, an expansion of the Erasmus offices in the regions, or more widespread offers of information are considered necessary. The Hungarian interviewee argued that while reaching out to the people with information is maybe more the duty of a member state, the organisation felt that the EU has the duty to cover such tasks if they are neglected by the member states.

Another funding-related problem mentioned several times is the project character of EU youth work and EU youth dialogues. In most cases, those interested in funding need to reapply every other year with different project outlines. There is no continuous funding although organising dialogue and increasing EU knowledge are continuous tasks. This creates uncertain situations and worries about job insecurity for those who are organising the projects. Qualified and experienced staff may leave the organisation for more secure and well-paid jobs, which poses a major problem for the long-term maintenance of projects and expertise. In addition to this, the relative inflexibility and activity orientation of EU funding were mentioned several times. The project organisations would prefer to have more planning freedom and independence in the implementation phase. The EU guidelines were described as mostly result oriented, which means that predetermined procedures had to be followed in the process, even though it was foreseeable that these would not lead to the desired results. In addition, strictly regulated financial reports had to be prepared on a regular basis, which meant a high workload for the organisations and thus impaired the effectiveness of the project.

3 Discussion of the Findings

The mentioned problems confirm the findings and observations made in several strands of research. It has been highlighted that informal education has to respond to challenges like a low interest in politics (see p. 547 in Becerik Yoldaş 2015; see p. 38 in Kahne and Middaugh 2008). Moreover, several recent studies have shown empirically that the peculiarities of the living conditions in rural areas influence the perceptions of politics (e.g. Rodríguez-Pose 2018). An empirical analysis of the EU population by Lago (see p. 768 in Lago 2022) concludes that citizen satisfaction with democracy “is heavily influenced by whether people live in urban or rural areas and whether inhabitants in rural areas are surrounded by many people or not. Those who live in rural areas are significantly less satisfied with the way democracy works than are those who live in urban areas, even after controlling for an array of individual-level characteristics that typically distinguish rural and urban populations.” For post-socialist regions, studies have diagnosed a weak civil society, resulting from the problems of the political and economic transition and legacies of the past (Kutter and Trappmann 2010; Weiss 2020; Mikecz 2023; Stoenescu 2022). In this sense, underdeveloped youth work in rural areas comes as no surprise.

Research thus suggests that a great part of the difficulties of youth dialogue projects mentioned above, e.g. the problems of reaching out to a target group, finding partners willing to cooperate, and a lack of one’s own financial resources, are structural ones, meaning that they cannot be solved easily within a couple of years. Moreover, it is evident that individual organisations cannot solve these problems alone. Thus, youth dialogues and youth dialogue programs need to be integrated into broader approaches to tackle the problems, as it is done, for example, in EU regional policy.

With regard to the most often mentioned problems of funding, it is evident that, in general, the post-socialist countries still have a comparatively low GDP, although incomes have grown considerably. NGOs interested in providing informal education on the EU or other issues refer for external funding either to the state or, more often, the EU, and to foundations from abroad, e.g. the Open Society Foundation, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, or to NGOs and foundations which themselves receive funding also from abroad, like the Civil Society Development Foundation and the Romanian-American Foundation in Romania (see p. 90 in Stoenescu 2022). The availability of such funding is a great chance to realise the respective projects, which otherwise would not have been conducted, but the organisations remain highly dependent on the source of financing. In contrast to wealthier countries, the dependence on funding reduces the chance to get the best personnel, to provide secure jobs, and to realise education and dialogue projects in a strategic way.

Since there is “a close link between strengthening active citizenship and education and youth work” (see p. 11 in Tham 2007, own translation), the predominantly precarious circumstances of youth work in rural areas throughout East Central Europe are a fundamental obstacle to sustainable youth participation in general. The general disenchantment with politics in society and the bad image of politics in some of the East Central European countries are also long-term problems. “Successful youth participation requires a positive relationship between youth and politics for both sides,” as Feldmann-Wojtachnia (see p. 8 in Feldmann-Wojtachnia 2007, own translation) put it. In order to ensure that youth dialogues do not remain merely an articulation of ideas for change, linkages between political decision-making processes and educational work are necessary (see p. 10 in Feldmann-Wojtachnia 2007). In addition, youth participation needs to be integrated into local structures for a long-term effect (see p. 13 in Tham 2007). It seems that there is a long way to go before such integration is achieved in the countries where the projects were conducted, but the first positive results, like the ones in Mińsk Mazowieckie or in one of the Hungarian municipalities, are promising.

There is a consensus in the literature that binding procedures linking citizen participation to political decision-making processes are necessary for successful participation (Feldmann-Wojtachnia 2007; Nanz and Fritsche 2012). This implies that future youth projects should pay more attention to making binding decisions in order to increase the mobilisation potential. This, however, may become an obstacle to getting support for the youth dialogues from politicians and officials. An alternative is to be as transparent as possible about the non-binding character of the outcomes. Nanz and Fritsche (see p. 130 in Nanz and Fritsche 2012) suggest that the initiators should ensure that the participants are informed about the influence of public participation in the further decision-making process after the project has been implemented. It should be explained publicly which results were taken into account in political decisions and which were not (see p. 130 in Nanz and Fritsche 2012). In the best case, the effects should be visible and relevant. If no or little information is available, this could cause the project to be perceived as an “alibi participation” (see p. 10 in Feldmann-Wojtachnia 2007) and even prevent participation in future projects. This would be problematic for the development of a European civil society.

While the projects could not change the rather persistent context conditions, it became evident that they contributed to increasing the participants’ knowledge about the European Union and the multi-level character of politics in the Union. Studies on civic participation assume that the acquisition of knowledge through youth participation projects is positively related to the willingness of young people to participate in social and political processes, to make their own judgment, and ultimately to get involved (Feldmann-Wojtachnia 2007; Tham 2007; Nanz and Fritsche 2012). Thus, the projects were very important for promoting EU citizenship in rural regions by providing knowledge, actively engaging young people, and stimulating new ideas and insights. If such processes of informal participation beyond elections really increase participation in general, is, however, disputed (see p. 35 in Geißel 2008).

Like nearly all persons interviewed, research on participation suggests that such projects should not just be a one-time event, but be designed for the long term or institutionalised to increase interest (Lorenz et al. 2020). This means that there would be a need for an established framework for young people to be involved in the political processes inside the EU. This seems to be particularly necessary in regions with structural obstacles to participation and youth work. Together with the arguments above, that suggests that funding should be extended to longer time periods and leave room for bottom-up approaches (see p. 12 in Tham 2007). Under such conditions, the organisations could involve the participants early on. Even though this is not a direct criterion for the success of the project, it is a favorable condition for project success (see p. 33f. in Geißel 2008).

4 Conclusion and Perspectives

The European Union has adopted a youth strategy programme and established extensive funding opportunities within the Erasmus+ framework. Involving youth in making decisions that directly affect them is one of its declared goals. The present chapter has compared the experiences of six youth dialogue projects funded by the EU with regard to challenges throughout the projects. Knowing these difficulties can contribute to improve the effectiveness of future projects.

The challenges that the organisations mentioned included the project character and limited periods of funding, the difficulty of reaching their target group in rural areas (especially remote rural areas) and motivating young people to be engaged for a longer time. Other challenges mentioned were the need to actively engage local decision-makers and make them take the subjects of the youth dialogue projects seriously, infrastructural problems, and an uneven access to information about EU programs. A number of these issues were discussed in more detail, and the findings were then linked to some overall observations from research.

Several of the identified problems are related to the particular context conditions of the projects, e.g. scarce financial resources and limited awareness of the EU. Given these obstacles, most project organisations suggested that the EU should provide funding for longer periods. Most of them also demanded that the EU acknowledge the relevance of local venues and local politics for EU citizenship and decision-making. Closer cooperation with and support from local actors was often mentioned as necessary.

More research is needed on how to tackle such obstacles in a systematic way. Besides, it is necessary to understand how these manifold problems can be solved in a coherent way. How to ensure, for example, high-quality projects through prolonged or regular funding without compromising the independence of civil society measures from the EU? How to ensure the openness of politicians to opinions and demands raised in youth dialogues by reaching more binding decisions without decreasing the willingness of young policy-newcomers to engage in dialogue projects? Future research needs to address these questions.