Erasmus+ is one of the European Union’s most visible and widely recognised policy programmes and is frequently described as a success story of European integration. Beyond its educational and mobility objectives, the programme explicitly aims to foster a sense of European identity not only among young people within the European Union but also among youth from neighbouring non-EU countries. In this context, the Eastern Partnership countries—particularly Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia—have become active participants in Erasmus+ projects. However, existing research on the impact of Erasmus+ on European identity formation presents inconsistent findings and remains predominantly focused on participants from EU member states. Moreover, despite its growing importance as a youth mobility and volunteering programme, the European Solidarity Corps (ESC) has received little scholarly attention regarding its effects on European identity. This paper is embedded in a broader mixed-methods research project that examines the role of European Commission youth programmes in shaping European identity in non-EU Eastern Partnership countries. The present contribution focuses exclusively on the quantitative component of the study and presents empirical findings from a two-wave longitudinal survey of Erasmus+ Higher Education exchange students and European Solidarity Corps volunteers from Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. The survey design enables the analysis of changes in participants’ sense of European identity before and after programme participation, allowing for an assessment of programme-related effects over time. The quantitative analysis compares identity trajectories across the two programmes in order to evaluate their relative impact and to identify key predictors of identity change, including programme type, intensity of participation, transnational social interaction, and prior orientations toward Europe. While the qualitative component of the project—based on in-depth interviews with programme participants—provides additional insights into subjective experiences and underlying mechanisms of identity formation, it is not the focus of this paper. Instead, the contribution foregrounds statistically grounded evidence on the effects of Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps in non-EU contexts. By shifting attention beyond EU member states and by offering longitudinal quantitative evidence, this paper contributes to research on European identity, transnational mobility, and soft integration beyond formal EU membership. The findings also provide policy-relevant insights into the effectiveness of EU youth programmes as instruments of identity-building in the EU’s neighbourhood.

Two countries, Serbia and Georgia, that officially still are candidates for EU membership are facing massive waves of public protest. They are not only challenging autocratic practices of their own governments, but also the way how the EU shapes its enlargement policy. While protesters in Serbia have already become more sobered about what the EU does to protect their freedom of expression and to back their demands, their Georgian counterparts are still speaking out in favour of EU-accession. The EU, in turn, is caught by its own lurching course between geopolitical and transactional considerations, paired with the efforts to uphold its identity as a normative actor by, for example, presenting its new Democracy Shield in November 2025. The paper will present insights on the interactional dynamics between protesters and EU institutions based on an in-depth document analysis and interviews. It will provide an understanding of policy-formation inside the EU, how this helps (or not) to support democratic resilience in countries with candidate status, creating a transnational arena, and how these processes influence the extent to which the social movements can uphold the support of their societies.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has generated overlapping layers of uncertainty affecting infrastructure, governance systems, demographic structures, and energy security. At the same time, Ukraine’s progressive integration into European Union frameworks introduces additional institutional and regulatory transformations. Within this context of structural volatility, municipalities are expected to pursue climate-neutral development pathways aligned with the European Green Deal and the Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission. This paper examines how scenario planning can function as a governance instrument for resilience and adaptation under conditions of compounded crisis. Drawing on the Horizon Europe–funded U_CAN (Ukraine towards Carbon Neutrality) project, the paper analyses the design and implementation of participatory scenario planning exercises conducted with Ukrainian municipalities. These exercises were developed to address three intersecting uncertainties: (1) war-related disruptions to infrastructure and demographic stability, (2) climate-related risks and energy transition challenges, and (3) institutional uncertainty linked to EU accession and funding alignment. Rather than treating climate neutrality as a fixed technical target, the approach frames it as a dynamic pathway shaped by crisis response capacities and innovation potential. Methodologically, the paper combines structured governance assessment with facilitated multi-stakeholder workshops that integrate municipal authorities, civil society actors, and technical experts. The scenario framework explores alternative trajectories of reconstruction, including varying levels of external funding stability, security conditions, and institutional reform. The findings suggest that scenario planning strengthens municipal adaptive capacity by improving anticipatory governance, cross-sector coordination, and risk-informed investment prioritisation. It also creates cognitive space for innovation, including experimentation with renewable energy solutions, decentralised infrastructure models, and participatory decision-making formats. The paper contributes to debates on “resilience through adaptation” and “crisis response and innovation” by conceptualising uncertainty not solely as instability but as a condition that can generate institutional learning and transformation. In doing so, it offers a governance-oriented perspective on how Ukrainian cities navigate the tension between fragility and long-term climate ambition within a rapidly restructuring European and global order.

What is the role of the government policy preferences to explain the formal convergence between the candidate countries and the EU acquis? This paper juxtaposes government policy preferences with external incentives model to account for the formal convergence in the area of social policy in seven EU candidate countries. To this end, the paper uses mixed methods design. It relies on a novel dataset measuring an annual degree of legal harmonization of Albania, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Ukraine between their signing of the association agreements and 2024. Furthermore, the paper presents qualitative insights from in-depth interviews from Georgia and North Macedonia. Using panel regression models, the paper explores the effect of left-right ideological position of the ruling party of the leading coalition partner and credibility of external incentives operationalized as different milestones of integration (i.e., signing the SAA/AA, applying for membership, granting candidate status, and opening accession negotiations). Quantitative analysis shows that both variables are significant predictors of formal convergence laying ground for qualitative analysis into how exactly ideologies of ruling parties and personal views of single politicians can impact the outcome of reforms. As a result, the paper argues that external incentives are not the sole driver of convergence and their impact is limited by domestic political processes and institutional constraints.