European Democracy Shield and ERASMUS+ DRONE Project:

a comparison

Introduction: The European Democracy Shield and a resilient society

In November 2025, the European Union introduced the European Democracy Shield (EDS) and implemented the EU Strategy for Civil Society (EUSCS), both outlined in the Political Guidelines 2024-2029 and in President von der Leyen’s candidacy speech. The primary objectives of the EDS and EUSCS are to adopt measures that protect the fundamental pillars of democratic systems, build more digitally resilient societies, enable them to combat disinformation and misinformation and safeguard the information space for a more neutral and democratic environment. Established after a process lasting more than a decade, after a series of ‘sudden turns’ such as Covid-19, the Ukraine-Russia war, and now the War on Gaza, JOIN (2025) 791/final definitively establishes the EDS in an attempt to contain the phenomenon of disinformation and online threats. The EDS takes up and refines some instruments already present in the European landscape and is structured along three main axes:

1) Safeguarding the integrity of the information space: with the goal of allowing citizens to exercise their rights and participate in democracy, and developing a protocol for digital incidents and crises to provide a safe and transparent space.

2) Strengthening democratic institutions, fair and free elections, and free and independent media: with the goals to cooperate more at the EU level and promote exchanges for the integrity of electoral processes, including through guidelines on the responsible use of AI in this process;

3) Boosting societal resilience and citizens’ engagement with specific strategies and means from each state. The goal is to help people recognise and combat information manipulation (Cappelluti 2026, https://url-shortener.me/EAG2).

In particular, the concept of resilience has become increasingly important within the European strategy. It could be defined as a ‘transformative, proactive and forward-looking’ (ibid.) means and approach to strengthening democracy and increasing the collective capacity to anticipate, identify and respond to threats, as reported by the European Commission (https://shorturl.at/ACJXK).

How the project puts these themes into practice

Within the European context, the DRONE project, in line with the EDS and EUSCS, is trying to translate the objectives set by these instruments into concrete strategies and tools. Each module, both independent and interconnected with the others, addresses specific themes but constantly acts in relation to all three objectives set out by the European Commission.

The “Information and Media Literacy” module, for example, provides participants with the essential digital literacy skills needed in the digital age, encourages proactive behaviour against misinformation through personal action plans and institutional strategies, and promotes critical thinking. Dialogue and critical comparison between students, teachers, school leaders, and parents represent the key to building an informed and resilient society. Through case studies, scientific approaches to disinformation (e.g., the CRAAP method), role-playing games, and co-constructed models (e.g., the daily digital information flow worksheet), the goal is to create a participatory and collaborative civic space that gives voice to different needs.

In addition, the module “Managing AI and cybersecurity in uncertain times” provides the basic skills to educate responsible digital citizens and learn practical strategies for navigating today’s complex information landscape. AI and cybersecurity are the key topics of this module, addressed through scenario-based events, discussion groups, and in-depth readings. These exercises will help schools and civic communities to address these issues concretely and develop whole-society resilience strategies. In developing the modules and implementing the European Union’s objectives, the DRONE project has also focused on basic skills, such as “Critical Thinking,” “Resilience Building,” and “Problem Solving,” around which other skills need to be built. Through road maps, exercises on the “online self” and the “offline self,” case studies, challenges, analysis of scientific readings, discussion groups, and specific methods (such as the DEAR method), parents, teachers, and school administrators will learn to think critically, collaborate, and solve potential challenges that arise. In this regard, some modules have been enriched with a sub-module dedicated to “critical situations.” Even with good training, teachers, parents, and school administrators can sometimes encounter misleading content. For this reason, it is essential to recognise the signs of a crisis and understand how to intervene while remaining calm. Through Incident Response Scenario Exchange, case studies, and templates, the participants will work on identifying the best strategies for building an increasingly resilient school and civil community.

Democracy and participation: possible challenges and the DRONE project approach

The implementation of the ESD, the EUSCS and a resilient and democratic civic space is certainly not a smooth process. The Introduction to the European Democracy Action Plan states that “democracy […] requires safeguards, checks and balances, and institutions that […] defend the rules of pluralism in democratic debate. For participation to be meaningful, citizens must also be able to form their own opinions […]. Democracy can only thrive in a climate where freedom of information and expression are both respected, in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights, allowing everyone to express their opinions, regardless of their critical stance towards governments and those in power.” These premises seem essential for building an open, dialogical, transparent, critically constructed, and resilient society, as emphasised by the European Commission.

However, at the same time, this process of preservation of a democratic framework seems to be at risk of being jeopardised by the presence of ample definitions found in various documents (Cappelluti 2026), which can lead to arbitrary interpretations of what disinformation is. This could result quite problematic, if what considered disinformation is “censored” or limited on the ground of the action by governments or national agencies or platforms of “fact checking” agencies, resulting in a limitation of the democratic debate, as it happened recently in Italy– (https://www.wired.it/video/watch/meta-censura-video-alessandro-barbero-referendum) – eventually, giving paradoxically more relevance to the message.

The issues is not to discourage grassroots debate and dialogue and impose definitions from above but to empower and engage  civil society.

In this regard, and in contrast to centralized actions over disinformation , from the outset, the DRONE project’s objective has been to adopt empower actors through a collaborative and participatory approach, welcoming all the possible needs of the groups involved. A bottom-up approach, along with the active involvement of adolescents, parents, teachers, and school leaders, was therefore adopted in multiple phases of the project.

While interviewing the four interest groups was already an important step in listening to the voices of the protagonists, direct involvement in workshops to agree on the best definitions and techniques for the project, the organisation of pilots with teachers, school leaders and adolescents—both within the borders of the countries involved and elsewhere—to test and improve training materials, and the sharing of handbooks to receive feedback, all represented strategies for active grassroots involvement and key collaboration to carry out a democratic project in line with the objectives set by the European Union.

The hope is the same as that expressed by President von der Leyen, namely to implement strategies and tools for democracy that strengthen “the fundamental elements that enable citizens to live shared democratic values every day: freedom of expression, independent media, resilient institutions, and a dynamic civil society. This is the strength of Europe, and we must increase our collective capacity to always protect it” (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2660), however relying on the competence of citizens rather than by agencies acting above citizens actions and knowledge.