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YouthDecide 2040

Youth-led dialogues shaping the future of democracy

The YouthDecide 2040 Horizon project models and tests participatory foresight practices to democratise our shared futures. Intergenerational, youth-led dialogues are at the core of deliberative processes in interconnected regional, national and transnational assemblies. Between January 2025 and December 2027, the Transnational Democracy Programme will contribute as a key consortium partner to numerous activities. Ambitiously, YD2040 brings together experts in future studies with scholars working on democratic innovations and backsliding. The joint diagnosis of the state of democracies, imbued in youth attitudes toward democracy, paves the way for cross-border engagement through multi-layered participatory processes. These include 20 national workshops welcoming 600 youth members, regional workshops and a digital platform engagement strategy, along with a final transnational deliberation taking place online, where harnessing the collective intelligence of multiple stakeholders will allow us to define the pathways to key democratic change for Europe.

While delivering on the core activities of the national workshop, the TDP has organised an event endorsed by the Province of Lecce, where local and regional political representatives, as well as civil society organisations and researchers debated the future of democratic renewal with the workshop participants and a wider local audience. This has consolidated a network of local universities and civil society organisations that mobilise around meaningful youth participation. The findings from the workshops will also enable the TDP team to analyse the evolving attitudes on competing visions of democracy, as they have evolved through the deliberative process. The ultimate aim of the TDP team is to continue exploring how to sequence democratic innovations through participatory chains that maximise resources, political capital and a growing pedagogy of non-electoral participation.

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The team

Research lead

The research team

Page last updated on 07/05/2026