Conference “Digital Participation Tools for Youth Engagement in Local Governance”

DYPALL Network launched the Study “Digital Participation Tools for Youth Engagement in Local Governance” at the international conference on 2nd June 2022 in Antwerp, Belgium.

The Study is a collection of digital tools and practices for local youth participation in decision-making processes from Belgium, Slovenia, Portugal, Italy and around Europe.  The Conference was a space for some of the tools from the Study to be presented to municipality representatives who also engaged in a conversation around challenges, opportunities and the impact of digital tools on local youth policies.

Enabling youth participation with digital tools is mentioned as one of the innovative practices in youth work in a publication of the European Commission (Developing digital youth work – Policy recommendations, training needs and good practice examples for youth workers and decision-makers: expert group set up under the European Union Work Plan for Youth for 2016-2018). Digital tools can be used to support the already existing structures and processes of youth participation or incentivize e-participation in online environments or a combination of both that can be complementary.

Although some work has already been done in exploring digital youth work in Europe and e-participation in general, there is still not enough systematised information about digital tools for youth participation in decision-making processes in particular. Therefore, a European consortium led by DYPALL Network has decided to conduct this Study on digital participation tools for youth engagement in local governance in order to collect practice examples of digital tools that strengthen youth participation in decision-making processes at the local level. These tools and practices were gathered from around Europe, with a particular focus on the countries of the project consortium, Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Slovenia, and are meant to serve as a resource for youth workers, organisations and municipalities in their work on fostering local youth participation.

This was the final event of the Erasmus + KA2 project “Digital Participation Tools for Youth Engagement in Local Governance” done by DYPALL Network in cooperation with Tree company (Belgium), ARS for Progress of People (Italy), Inštitut za elektronsko participacijo – INePA (Slovenia) and GIShub I GIScience for Humanity (Italy) supported by the Portuguese National Agency.

The Study is available for download on this link: https://tinyurl.com/StudyDigitalTools.

Related News