Context

Over the last several years, we have seen young citizens mobilise over various environmental issues, through protests, advocacy campaigns and during elections. Concerns with climate and biodiversity have also consistently topped the priority lists of youth-focused opinion studies. This is not surprising. While the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution is of existential significance to the entire society, young people and future generations will face the most significant impacts and live with the consequences of current actions and inactions. This might be why environmental issues (among which most prominently climate) have been so often selected as topics for citizen assemblies, and why more and more of these processes focus specifically on youth.    

Among the many pressing issues, the decline of pollinating insects (beyond honeybees including also bumblebees, moths, hoverflies, butterflies and others) sits at the intersection of the triple crisis and is of fundamental importance, though remains little known. The well documented loss of species over the recent decades is driven, among others, by climate change, pollution, land-use change, invasive species and diseases. Due to the fundamental role of pollinators in plant reproduction, their continuing decline will send ripple effects through the wider living world as well as through the human societies, undermining the functioning of ecosystems and agriculture. So how do we address the complex practical, political and ethical issues at the heart of this crisis?

EU Pollinators Initiative, a Commission Communication setting the first-ever EU-wide framework to address the decline of wild pollinating insects reserves a significant role in this task to citizens. One of its three priorities focuses on 'mobilising the society', and this includes employing participatory, deliberative and co-creation processes to address 'topics and interventions raising controversy' as well as 'tensions between different actors, including citizens'. To put this ambition in practice, recognising at the same time the particular energy and stakes of youth, with the start of 2025 the European Commission has initiated the implementation of a Young Citizens Assembly on pollinators. This deliberative process, building on the experience of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFE) and European Citizens’ Panels (ECP), will offer new ways to bring co-creation and deliberative practices into the functioning of the EU Institutions - this time by focusing specifically on young citizens, with their concerns and ideas. 

The Assembly

The Assembly will gather young citizens from across the EU, aged 18-29. They will meet in Brussels in September and December 2025 and March 2026, as well as online. The Assembly will provide young people with the space and time to learn together, share knowledge, visions and experiences, and deliberate over key problems related to pollinators’ decline. Throughout the process, the participants will be involved in issue framing, articulating the terms of the debate around contentious issues linked to the decline of pollinators, developing recommendations on the issue responding to policy needs, and ultimately exploring ideas on policy implementation. But next to this thematic dimension, the Assembly also has a methodological task, being a pilot project for a potential permanent deliberative process. 

The Assembly is part of a European Parliament pilot project ‘Youth for pollinators – fostering youth engagement and participatory governance in pollinator conservation’, which is aiming to empower young generations to act on one of the key issues in the biodiversity crisis. As a pilot, the Assembly will test the feasibility and value of a Young Citizens Assembly as part of the EU-level biodiversity governance framework, with view to establishing a permanent mechanism of youth participation. For this reason, the Assembly will include many aspects of co-design, where participants will also develop recommendations on how such a permanent mechanism should look. 

Beyond the experiences of CoFE, ECPs and many deliberative processes that are taking place across the world, the Assembly builds on several years of collaboration between CC-DEMOS and DG Environment, where we piloted a number of citizen engagement processes around the topic of pollinators decline. We also had several opportunities to discuss this project with experts in deliberation and youth engagement. Continuing this work of ongoing learning, the Assembly will also explore art-based methods and tools, seek closer involvement of the civil society and stakeholders through an Advisory Committee as well as implement new ways of integrating the Citizens' Engagement Platform into Assembly's work in order to bring the wider public closer to the deliberations.   

Next steps

We're excited to see how this project will be coming to life over the next months! Keep an eye on this space, as we will share info about options for participation, e.g., through the Citizens' Engagement Platform, outreach materials about the deliberations and insights into the workings of the Assembly. In parallel to the Assembly, in the next couple of months we will also provide a citizen engagement Toolkit, which will include materials and guidelines for anyone who wants to organise a participatory process on the topic of pollinators’ decline.