Youth Decide 2040

Democracies in Europe have demonstrated resilience and modernisation in the face of various social and technological challenges. Democracy in the age of the Anthropocene will necessitate radical shifts in values, power relations and modes of governance, while also being built on the present, in all its diversity, paradox and insufficiency. Innovating to meet these challenges will require re-imagining how people living in democracies become equipped and supported to co-create resilient, democratic futures in Europe and beyond.

Clear visions are needed to build strategies that allow for rethinking and redesigning spaces, institutions, instruments and ways to represent and include people in democratic governance. Youth Decide 2040 aims to support European Union democracy to rise to these challenges through evidence- based historical and contemporary knowledge, strategic foresight, and robust deliberation. Specifically, YouthDecide 2040 has the main objective to: co-create with European youth – and older generations, political and institutional actors, and organised civil society – coherent pathways to desired futures of democracy in the European Union in 2040.

All activities are planned to be inclusive and open processes – transparently documented along the way – to enable repetition and implementation beyond the lifeof the project. The project's ambition is to reinvigorate democracy in and across Europe by creating visions and pathways for becoming more resilient to current and future challenges, developed through active and inclusive citizen participation.

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Task

As lead for Work Package 2, the primary task of the ISI Foresight team has revolved around the development of a participatory foresight workflow and toolkit to help Europeans co-create scenarios that describe new democratic systems of governance. This task has included:

The integration of research results from the Work Package 1 desk research activities on democratic innovations and challenges to European democracies.
The co-design and reflexive prototype testing of the workflow’s initial iterations across 5 workshops in different European regions.
Organizing the finalisation of the Co-creation of Preferred Scenarios Workflow in preparation for the 19 National Assembly workshops.
The creation of a digital data capture system embedded within the Co-creation Workflow (trans. 15 languages).

During the YouthDecide 2040 National Assemblies, the Fraunhofer ISI team is collecting and analysing data across all of the workshops, and will co-lead the WP3 task of distilling 4-6 preferred futures scenarios that can account for the diverse scenarios produced by assembly participants. In total, we expect this analysis to include digital data captured during the workflow along with 80-100 scenarios produced by European Youth during the national assemblies.