On 13 October 2026, the Council of the EU adopted its Conclusions on inclusive democratic participation, and societal and community resilience. Among them is a sentence worth keeping close: trust “is enhanced when authorities act transparently and accountably and evidence-based, and when citizens are provided with clear feedback on how their participation has been taken into account in decision making.” For anyone who has ever argued for the time and budget to report back to participants, this is a useful sentence to have.
The conclusions are part of a wider shift. The European Democracy Shield (November 2025) promises support for “participatory and consultative tools, with a focus on local levels and youth.” The EU Strategy for Civil Society, adopted the same day, sets out guiding principles for dialogue with civil society and a new Civil Society Platform. The Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness (March 2026) proposes a “youth check” so that policymaking gives “greater weight to the views and concerns of young people.” All point in the same direction: asking people is no longer enough; their views need to visibly count.
Our own programmes are, in places, already ahead. The Erasmus+ Programme Guide 2026 asks each Youth Participation Activity to plan, as part of its follow-up, “providing feedback on concrete project outcomes to the young participants, including on how such outcomes have been communicated to other relevant stakeholders and/or used by them.” In practice, that means one extra step before a project closes: a message to the young people saying what came of their ideas and who heard about them. In other actions, the Guide mostly asks participants to give feedback rather than to receive it. What one action already expects could become practice across all of them.
The new Implementation Guidelines of the Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps Participation Strategy (2026) take this step for every sector. They ask for participation to be considered before, during and after a, and they are refreshingly concrete about the end: “Projects should plan for this from the start, making the ‘exit’ an entry into future engagement.” They describe an institutional approach in which involvement “is not just encouraged; it is structured, supported, expected and evaluated,” andgive National Agencies a role in keeping it on track throughmonitoring, evaluation and regular feedback. They even suggest adding participation-specific questions in application and evaluation forms, which would help make visible what our data cannot yet see.
The guidelines also translate the priority sector by sector, and several passages speak directly to the return journey. For schools, they call for school councils “not to be used solely for organising social or cultural events, but as student representative structures participating in decisions.” For VET, they point to “methods and approaches to incorporate the views of learners into the design, implementation and evaluation of VET projects.” For adult learning, they note that many learners “may have had the experience of not feeling listened to by institutions,” which makes a visible answer all the more important. And for sport, they highlight “participatory governance within sports clubs.” Each sector has its own entry point, but the underlying question is the same: do people see what their participation changed?
Policy has not solved everything, and those closest to practice say so. DYPALL Network’s Position Paper on the next EU Youth Strategy notes that “access to meaningful participation often depends on where young people live rather than on a consistent commitment to democratic governance,” and that “participation mechanisms often lack stable institutional recognition, dedicated resources and appropriate reference frameworks.” Its answer is to “promote participation as a governance principle rather than a project-based activity.” Loops close more easily when the structures that carry them do not disappear at the end of each project. Feedback is easier to give when participation structures outlast individual projects.
Many of these policies were themselves shaped by participation: the Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness drew on a European Citizens’ Panel that brought together 150 randomly selected citizens from all 27 EU Member States, and the public consultation on the EU Youth Strategy post-2027 closed on 16 July 2026.. The principle the Council describes applies at European level too.
For National Agencies, SALTOs and networks, this opens two directions. Downwards, the tools are already on paper. The feedback step that the Programme Guide asks of Youth Participation Activities can serve as a model for other actions and sectors. The Implementation Guidelines propose indicators such as the “% of co-created actions” or “target groups in governance or consultative roles”. A single question in reporting, asking projects how participants were told about the results would bring the return journey into everyday monitoring. Upwards, three processes are open right now. The EU Youth Strategy post-2027 is being drafted, the new Civil Society Platform is being set up, and the actions of the Democracy Shield are due by 2027. Long Term Activities and Strategic National Agencies Cooperation projects, both named in the Implementation Guidelines, are natural channels for carrying what participants say about what worked, what did not and whether they heard back. The policies now ask for feedback. Our programmes can show what it looks like.