NextGenerationEU as a (more) youth-friendly Europe?

ABSTRACT

In many countries across Europe, youth conditions and intergenerational inequalities have frequently remained at the margins of political interest and a residual topic in discourses on welfare and in social policies. Difficulties in transitions to adulthood and issues of social inclusion of youth have, for a long time, been conceived of as problems to be addressed largely by acting on families rather than through policy measures addressing young people directly. In this scenario, the NextGenerationEU plan promises and requires a change of approach, defining youth inclusion as a strategic priority, identifying young people as main actors in their lives and in society, and imagining a more youth-inclusive and equal future for Europe. Focusing on Italy and Poland – two countries distinguished by a relatively weak social inclusion of young people and a familiarized approach to youth policy – the article retraces the main traits of the condition of youth in the two national contexts and reflects on what ideas of youth and of youth futures emerge in the national implementation programmes of the NextGenerationEU.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• youth policies
• NextGenerationEu
• Italy
• Poland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This article is the result of the collaborative work of the three authors. Specifically, Alessandro Martelli has written the introduction and section 2.1, Ilaria Pitti has written sections 3.1, 4.1 and the conclusion, and Ewa Krzaklewska has written sections 2.1, 3.2 and 4.2.

2 See https://europa.eu/youth/year-of-youth_en#content

3 Mobility as an important area within youth policy coming to the debate with Green Paper on the learning mobility of young people in 2009, even if the Erasmus programme as an exchange programme for higher education students was established in 1987. In 2008, the first recommendation in the youth field was adopted in relation to the mobility of young volunteers in the EU.

4 NextGenerationEU’s budget builds on top of the EU’s long-term budget for 2021–27 and, combined with the latter, will provide more than 1.85 trillion euros to the Union’s hardest-hit regions (European Commission, 2020c).

5 The six missions are: ‘1 – Digitalisation, Innovation, Competitivity, Culture and Tourism’; ‘2 – Green revolution and Ecological Transition’; ‘3 – Infrastructures for a sustainable mobility’; ‘4 – Education and Research’; ‘5 – Inclusion and Cohesion’ and ‘6 – Health’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ewa Krzaklewska

Ewa Krzaklewska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her research interests include topics related to youth and youth policy, i.e. the processes of entering adulthood, educational mobility and migration, as well as the sociology of families and gender equality. She has recently edited a volume on impact of COVID-19 on youth transitions (with F. Tillman, A. Stepelton, H. Williamson, Council of Europe, in print) as well as Mobility, Education and Employability in the European Union: Inside Erasmus (with D. Cairns, V. Cuzzocrea, A. Allaste, Palgrave, 2018).

Alessandro Martelli

Alessandro Martelli is Full Professor at Bologna University – Department of Sociology and Business Law. He conducts research on transformations of social needs and of welfare systems, covering issues such as Europeanization and multilevel governance of social policies, with a specific attention to policies against poverty, transition to adulthood, work/family reconciliation. He is one of the Editors of Autonomie locali e servizi sociali, a quarterly scientific journal devoted to welfare issues (‘il Mulino’ publisher). Among his recent works, the chapter ‘Youth Participation and Mediation Practices: Issues of Social Learning’ (with S. Volturo), in Z. Bečević and B. Andersson (eds), Youth Participation and Learning: Critical Perspectives on Citizenship Practices in Europe (Springer, 2022).

Ilaria Pitti

Ilaria Pitti is Senior Assistant Professor at University of Bologna (Italy) and Vice-President of ISA’s RC34 ‘Sociology of Youth’. She conducts research on youth conditions and youth participation, with a focus on non-institutional forms of youth engagement and youth cultures. She has recently published the edited volume Young people’s participation: revisiting youth and inequalities in Europe (with M. Bruselius-Jensen and E.K.M. Tisdall for Policy Press, 2021) and the article ‘Liminal participation: young people’s practices in the public sphere between exclusion, claims of belonging and democratic innovation’ (with A. Walther and Y. Mengilli, for Youth & Society, 2021).