Introduction: the Development of Youth Policies in Europe in Past Decades

Tom Chevalier, Patricia Loncle
2021 Youth and Globalization  
Youth policies in Europe represent an issue quite difficult to grasp: according to countries and to territories, their target, their content and their resources appear to vary dramatically, although they have been developed more or less in all European national and infra national contexts during the last decades. Yet, little knowledge has been gathered so far to describe and analyze the evolution of these policies. This special issue will explore the recent trends that influence youth policies
more » ... n Europe: the way they are framed, implemented and, possibly, assessed. The development of youth policies in Europe may be analysed as the result of three concurrent processes, which take place at different levels of policymaking. Firstly, the rise of European youth policies under the leadership of the European Commission and the Council of Europe, in particular since the 2001 White Paper "A new impetus for European youth". Indeed, although the European institutions do not have competences that would apply in a mandatory way to the Member States, they play a very significant role in the field of youth policies. This role is embodied both by the Council of Europe, which has been working on youth issues since the 1960s, and by the European Commission, which has taken on these tasks since 1986 and has launched the "Youth for Europe" Programme. Of course, these two institutions have their own, only partially overlapping, agendas, objectives and values (Boetzelen, 2017) . Nevertheless, they have been working together since 1998 through the creation of the Youth Partnership, the joint organisation of training sessions, the publication of a specialized magazine (the Coyote magazine), the
doi:10.1163/25895745-03010001 fatcat:27hry7bd7zbmra6ilruprdzp5q