These words aligned well with the conference’s objectives: by empowering youth work and strengthening youth participation, we can address some of today’s most pressing challenges .
In his keynote, Staffan I. Lindberg , director of the V-Dem institute, offered words and numbers describing current developments. Empirical data on shrinking civic space and declining civic engagement showed that the experiences shared by participants in the working groups are part of a broader trend. The same applies to challenges related to funding and the rise of undemocratic narratives. The Power of Civil Society Not only the participants, but also anti-democratic actors are aware of the significance of social engagement and civil society. Participants from countries such as Belarus and Serbia shared experience of extreme repression of youth CSOs. The stories shared at the conference are not isolated incidents. According to V-Dem, the repression of civil society ranks among the three most significant democracy indicators in the period 2014-2024, while declining civic engagement is among the top five. For the youth sector, recognizing this development for what it is can be challenging, as attacks on democracy are rarely as blatant as they were in the United States in 2025. Typically, democratic decline occurs incrementally. Youth organisations are often used to work with unsecure funding and the need of constant justification of their work. The exchange with other participants and the keynote by Lindberg helped to recognize how this experience is related to shrinking democratic spaces. Strikingly, participants from countries that can be classified as autocracies told stories that participants from countries considered democratic and free could relate to. Significant differences remain. In some countries, ‘foreign-agent-laws’ make CSO work nearly impossible, while in others youth workers are employed in publicly funded NGOs. But the approach to question the trustworthiness of CSOs, scrutinize the ‘efficacy’ of public funding or question the legitimacy of foreign funding is strikingly similar. Democracy needs engaged citizens and organized civil society; therefore, anti-democratic forces seek to weaken it. The Power of Money Money is power, is a German saying. If this is true, the global decline of democracies is even more worrying. Lindberg underlined that not only the number of countries classified as democracies has been declining since over a decade. The decline becomes even more pronounced when measured per person (population-weighted) or by economic influence (GDP weighted). Today, not only less countries are democratic than ten years ago, but also less people live in a democracy and these people command over much less financial means. This is exacerbated by the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Lindberg estimated that through these developments more than half of the financial resources invested in democracy promotion on a global scale have been cut. Experiences in the youth sector reflect these global developments. Several participants reported the reduction of international funding. They shared that some international donors expect that projects are implemented as planned despite severe cuts in funding. In non-democratic contexts, public money
5
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs