Suchergebnisse

Patricia Friedrich und Frederike Hofmann-van de Poll setzen sich mit der Beteiligung junger Menschen an politischen Entscheidungsprozessen auseinander. Sie konzentrieren sich dabei auf das Format des Strukturierten Dialogs für junge Menschen, das seit 2009 auf europäischer, nationaler, regionaler und kommunaler Ebene einen Prozess der Beteiligung junger Menschen an politischen Maßnahmen in Gang setzen soll. Die Autorinnen sehen dieses Format der Jugendpartizipation in einem Spannungsfeld zwischen bloßer Meinungsabfrage und einem wirksamen Beteiligungsmechanismus und sie erörtern die bisherige Beteiligungspraxis kritisch. Im Fokus steht bei ihnen die Frage, ob es mit Hilfe des Strukturierten Dialogs gelungen ist, Perspektiven Jugendlicher auf nationaler und europäischer Ebene sichtbar zu machen und diese Perspektiven in den Prozess der Umsetzung der EU-Jugendstrategie in Deutschland einzuspeisen. Zu dieser Frage gab es zwischen 2014 bis 2016 am Deutschen Jugendinstitut (DJI) das Projekt "Wissenschaftliche Begleitung der Umsetzung der EU-Jugendstrategie in Deutschland 2010-2018". Die Autorinnen stellen in ihrem Beitrag wesentliche Ergebnisse dieses Projekts vor und kommen insgesamt zu einem sehr ernüchternden Befund.

In the light of domestic coordination processes in federal states, this article deals with the interplay of domestic governmental and non-governmental actors in the development of a German position for negotiations in the EU youth policy field. The qualitative single-case study is embedded in the evaluation of the German implementation of the EU Youth Strategy (2010-2018). It focusses on the roles, mutual perceptions, conflicts, and resulting action strategies of the different actors involved in the domestic coordination processes. In doing so, the article adds to the debate on Europeanisation and domestic coordination processes in federalist states by facilitating an understanding of the extent to which differing framework conditions of a specific policy field at the domestic and EU-Level can influence domestic policy coordination and its bottom-up processes.
The analysis reveals a discrepancy between the intentions of the actors to work together based on a multi-level governance approach, and a reality in which the Federal Ministry assumes a gatekeeper function. The problems following this discrepancy can be explained on the one hand by different perceptions and expectations the actors have towards the coordination process and on the other hand by a lack of a youth policy culture of debate. The article shows how these problems lead to different action strategies by the domestic actors and the use of different pathways to bring their interests to the EU level. Simultaneously, the findings show that these different strategies of action can successfully lead to a stronger German position, provided these pathways are used in a coordinated manner. The analysis shows that a domestic coordination process involving both governmental and non-governmental actors from different levels working together on an equal footing by using a multi-level governance approach, can only function in federal policy cooperation processes when the actors focus on content-related discussions rather than formal forms of cooperation.

Abstract
Against the background of the implementation of the EU Youth Strategy (2010–2018) in Germany, the article explores the question of how European youth policy can be anchored at the municipal level. The article discusses (1) federal and regional efforts to incorporate the municipal level in implementing European youth policy, (2) arising challenges and (3) the significance of European policy for national, regional and municipal youth policy. Results suggest that although the involved actors stipulate the importance of municipal level involvement in designing the implementation of the EU Youth Strategy in Germany, the Strategy is actually implemented as a top-down strategy in which the municipal level receives impulses from other levels, rather than being incorporated in policy development. The article concludes that, in order to successfully strengthening European impulses in sub-national youth welfare discourses, mutual understanding and dialogue between levels is just as necessary as a content-related rather than process-related discussion.

The promotion of democratic awareness and democratic values among young people in Europe is an important goal of European youth policy. In various documents on democracy and young people, European institutions assume that increased participation among young people results in strengthening a democratic Europe. Measuring democratic values and participation of young people is therefore a core element of European evidence-based policy, resulting in a massive body of studies that address statistical relationships between participation, democracy and young people. This brings up the question of how guiding concepts like participation, democratic attitude, political interest and civic citizenship are measured and are compared at the European level. This working paper is part of an ongoing research project to find answers to these questions and in this sense can give first or preliminary answers. The paper consists of two main parts. First, we present an overview of international databases and surveys on democracy and participation. Second, based on Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we analyse 78 recent studies, which use these data to draw conclusions on the relationship between democracy, participation and young people. With our paper, we want to contribute critically to the discussion on the comparability of data and studies on democracy and participation, as well as to the discussion on the relevance of these concepts and the conclusions drawn from them for European youth policy.

Following a lexical search of keywords, the general overview identifies trends in the analysed documents. These trends relate both to the conceptual basics of youth work and to the societal challenges that youth work is responding to. Whereas a keyword like "youth worker" is continuously mentioned in all documents over all years, other keywords follow trends, for example "refugee", which increases from 2018 onwards. Comparing political to professional documents show that political documents focus slightly more on conceptual keywords rather than on keywords associated with societal challenges, whereas professional documents focus slightly more on societal challenges. In summary, the general overview provides a specific pattern of topics that have been discussed in the European institutional discourse on youth work during the past five years: the relationship between youth work and overriding societal challenges; youth work and its support to young people in their personal development; and the framework conditions for youth work that support the previous two discourses. Following this pattern, the paper is divided in three more content-related chapters: the importance of youth work for society; supporting personal development as an important strategy for youth work; and the conceptual basics of youth work.