A Blessing or a Curse for Youth Participation - a Comparison of Transnational Youth Strategies

A policy strategy is a collective action plan that aims to achieve specific goals in a specific context and to make decisions on demands, areas and tactics of collective action to influence others to act in the desired way. In transnational youth policy, for example, the European Union has developed the EU Youth Strategy. With this EU youth strategy, the European Union aims to involve young people and make them active citizens engaged in democracy and society. The EU Youth Strategy is the framework for EU youth policy cooperation for the period 2019-2027 and aims to fully exploit the potential of youth policy. At national level, there are also national youth strategies that target the national context. In my presentation, I would like to give an overview of the different youth strategies of some selected countries that are part of the European Union, compare them with each other and with the EU Youth Strategy in general. The aim is to highlight the similarities but also the differences in order to answer the question of how youth strategies are developed to really involve young people as active political citizens. Furthermore, the question should be answered whether these strategies can actually mobilise young people and promote youth participation.