Youth Policy in Croatia: The (Un)wanted Child of the Croatian Administration

In the summer of 2020, Croatian youth policies that were dispersed across various ministries were for the first time molded into a single state administration body whose goal is to formulate and coordinate not only youth policy, but demographic policy as well. As stated in the Founding Decree, but also in the Law on the Organization and Scope of State Administration Bodies, it is envisaged that the Central State Office for Demography and Youth (Središnji državni ured za demografiju i mlade – SDUDM), within which youth policy has been coexisting with another important area – demography, with their 67 planned civil servants and state employees serves as a central place for coordinating youth policies.

Youth policy in the narrower sense, institutionalized in the Youth Service, is placed in one of the two existing sectors – the Youth Sector and Parenthood Promotion, although it is not entirely clear why parenthood promotion is not part of the demographic part of the state office. In addition, the regulation foresees the existence of two independent services that will perform tasks relevant to the youth sector – the Independent Service for Programs and Projects in the Field of Demography and Youth and the Independent Service for International Cooperation in the Field of Demography and Youth. It goes without saying that a state body structured in this way, due to the horizontal nature of youth policies, cooperates with other state and public bodies in the Republic of Croatia and has to communicate and cooperate with the civil sector.

Considering that the four-year mandate of the Central State Office for Demography and Youth is coming to an end, it is the right time for a partial evaluation of its work, using the postulates of the evaluation theory of public policies and communication models, with the aim of objectively analyzing a segment of the national youth policy. Therefore, this text consists of two parts. In the first part, I provide an overview of the content of SDUDM’s work based on available information on the website (plans and reports), and in the second part, I analyze the news on the website and the content of the Facebook profile of SDUDM.

Due to the nature of this text, the analysis carried out will not be exhaustive. In Croatia, other public and state bodies (such as the Ministry of Science and Education, the Ministry of Culture and Media, the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development, the Agency for Mobility and EU Programs, the Youth Council of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, the National Youth Council and others) have an influence on youth policies but are here left out of the scope of analysis. The aim of this paper is to analyze the work of the central body of a public policy based on publicly available information and offer an answer to the question of whether the existence of this body justified the expectations of decision makers.

In December 2020, the SDUDM published the document Implementation Program of the Central State Office for Demography and Youth for the period 2021-2024, which is an obligation based on the Act on the System of Strategic Planning and Development Management of the Republic of Croatia. Two goals are stipulated in the document: support for parenting and greater involvement of young people. The content of the document announces the adoption of a new strategic document and apostrophizes civil society, local and regional self-government units, and youth councils as key partners, and among specific groups of young people, young people with fewer opportunities, i.e. young people in rural areas, are highlighted as prominent target groups that should be given special attention. The implementation program states that, in the period 2021-2024, the SDUDM will adopt one strategic document in the field of youth by the end of December 2021, and one regulation in the field of youth in December 2022 (amendments to the Act on Youth Councils). In addition, in 2021 and 2022, SDUDM will finance 160 projects of youth associations and for young people, while in 2023 and 2024, that number will grow to 170. For the first two years, it is planned that 25 projects will be aimed at young people in rural areas, and for the other two, 30 of them. In conclusion, from 2022 to 2024, every year SDUDM will mark one date dedicated to young people. It was planned to spend HRK 11,000,000 for the implementation of these activities.

Even a cursory review of these goals and the allocated funds for their implementation reveals modesty in planning, but it remains to be seen whether this state body may have exceeded its initial plans through its work?

Activities and goals of SDUDM 2020-2024: the annual reports

In order to answer questions about the achievement of goals, available annual reports on the work of the SDUDM were collected, of which a total of two were published on the website of that state body at the time of writing. On average, the annual report of this state body has 14 pages, of which one and a half pages are dedicated to young people.

In the reports for 2021 and 2022, two activities are listed: Ensuring prerequisites for the active participation of young people in society (adopted strategic act in the field of youth, adopted amendments to the Act on Youth Councils) and creating more opportunities for young people with a special emphasis on young people in rural areas (financial support for projects and programs aimed at young people with special emphasis on young people in rural areas, marking of an important date related to young people).

In 2021, the SDUDM established a working group for the preparation of the Draft Proposal of the Law on Amendments of the Law on Youth Councils in connection with ensuring the prerequisites for the active participation of young people in society, i.e. the indicator of results (adopted strategic act in the field of youth, adopted amendments to the Law on Youth Councils), which held one meeting; subcontracted the preparation of the Analysis of the situation in the youth sector in the Republic of Croatia; established a working group for the development of the National Program for Youth, which held one meeting.

While in both reports the first activity is not performed, the second one is presented as “in progress” in the report for 2021, and as completed in the report for 2022. Since there are no reports for the years 2023 and 2024, what is known is that the SDUDM implemented the National Youth Program and the Amendments to the Law on Youth Councils only in 2023, i.e. with a delay of two years compared to the initial Implementation Program.

The measure Creating more opportunities for young people with special emphasis on young people in rural areas in 2021 consisted of the allocation of funds through a public call for youth associations and for young people (see table) and the organization of the webinar “Transformation of food systems: Innovations of young people for human and planetary health”.

In 2022, as part of the measure Ensuring the prerequisites for the active participation of young people in society, on December 30, the SDUDM sent the Draft Proposal of the Law on Amendments to the Law on Youth Advice for public consultation, and three meetings of the Working Group for the creation of the National Youth Program were held, which resulted with the Draft. Related to the measure Creating more opportunities for young people with special emphasis on young people in rural areas, a public call for youth associations and for young people was announced that year (see table) and a round table Intergenerational solidarity and creating a world for all ages was held. In the Report for 2022, it is stated that the measure to establish multifunctional centers was not implemented due to “certain obstacles”. The public does not know what kind of obstacles these are.

As for the financing of youth associations and for young people, after 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, SDUDM did not call for tenders or finance youth associations and for young people, even though these entities provided what the state provided only in a very limited manner (psychological assistance, space for spending free time in the form digital work with young people, a platform for socialization, informal education, etc.), it still did that in 2021, 2022 and 2023. The table contains an overview of the allocated funds. The table shows that neither the target number of projects nor the desired number of financed projects for young people from rural areas has been achieved.

Although the reports for 2023 and 2024 are not available at the time of writing this text, it is clear from the news on the website that the Government of the Republic of Croatia adopted the National Youth Program from 2023 to 2025 at its session on June 7, 2023, and that on July 14, 2023, the Croatian Parliament passed the Law on Amendments to the Law on Youth Councils by a majority of votes. This fulfilled the goal that SDUDM had at the beginning of its mandate (Ensuring prerequisites for the active participation of young people in society). Admittedly, two years late. In addition, the website of the SDUDM also mentions the financing of the development of multifunctional centers for young people (one in 2023 and four in 2024), but we cannot talk about the realization due to the lack of data. Another aspect that is necessary for understanding the work of SDUDM is the communication aspect, which is the subject of the next part of this text.

Communication of SDUDM through the website and Facebook profile

Since the launch of the SDUDM website, a total of 628 news has been published on it, of which 181 are about youth, or 28.8%. If we analyze the content of the posts, there are several categories. The first category includes administrative topics, the announcement of various (results) of tenders, announcements of SDUDM invitations, and the adoption of a strategic and legal framework. The second category refers to informing the public about the work of the Youth Council of the Government of the Republic of Croatia and the Young Delegate of the UN, the third to conveying the news of partner organizations (for example, European bodies, the Council of Europe, the Association of Cities, etc.). Protocol greetings marking important days are the fourth category, and the most prevalent category are notifications about the activities of State Secretary Željka Josić. Most of the notices on the SDUDM website (in all five categories) are personalized so that it is the State Secretary who is the main subject of the announcement, i.e. the public is informed about who Josić met with, which unit of local or regional self-government she visited (predominantly those from Sisak-Moslavina County where Željka Josić is from), and at which conferences and meetings the state secretary attended.

As far as communication on social networks is concerned, the most active social network Facebook was chosen, which at the time of writing has about 1900 fans and 139 followers. For the purposes of this text, all publications were analyzed. The frequency results show that in three and a half years, the share of partial or exclusive announcements that focus on young people is around 37%. It is particularly interesting that in 2022, which was the European Year of Youth, SDUDM published only 35% of all posts (out of a total of 239) on the topic of youth. If we start with the content analysis of posts dedicated to young people, we will see that the content does not deviate from the posts on the website: it is mostly the transfer of information from other entities and reports about the participation of the state secretary in various events.

Conclusion: policy personalization and room for improvement

What can we conclude from all these data about the work of SDUDM? Let me remind you that this is a state body that should coordinate not one but two horizontal policies, propose measures for the improvement of youth and demography, and achieve cooperation with various stakeholders so that demographic policy and youth policy are incorporated into the overall work of the government, other public policies and correspond to the needs of the target groups.

Although we cannot draw conclusions about the content of public policies from this analysis, it is quite clear that the objectives of the SDUDM have been achieved. However, these goals were more than modest. These are mostly inherited orientations from the entity that preceded SDUDM (Ministry of Demography, Family, Youth and Social Policy). Likewise, it is evident that even these modest goals were not adequately planned, since SDUDM was late in implementing activities or did not achieve the target values, for example in the number of projects it was supposed to finance. Furthermore, the communication patterns of this body are complementary to the conclusions presented earlier and confirm that the main modus operandi of the SDUDM is the transmission of information, the sharing of statistics, the marking of (un)important days and anniversaries, and the personalization of youth policy in the form of the state secretary. From the SDUDM’s communication strategy, we do not learn much about the content of youth policies, and even less about how the coordination of public policies takes place, which is certainly something that needs to be improved in the future.

On the question of whether the SDUDM justified its existence, this rudimentary analysis cannot give an unequivocal answer, but it should be noted that the adoption of one strategy and amendments to one law and the administration of three public calls for CSOs in four years, along with the organization of several (online) seminars and conferences, can hardly be considered ambitious. Bearing in mind the limitations of this analysis, all of the above suggests that there is a lot of room for progress, both in terms of content and communication, in the coordination and communication of national youth policies.