At the 2025 European Congress of Local Governments (ECLG), under the theme “Global Challenges – Local Solutions,” is one of Europe’s largest local government conferences, gathering more than 2,500 participants, including local and central government officials, business leaders, NGOs, academics, and experts from across Europe.
Key Themes
Beris Gwynne attended the Congress on behalf of the GRFC. It featured more than 250 events across six thematic areas:
- Economy and Finance;
- Investments and Innovations;
- Culture and Tourism;
- Politics and Security;
- Society and Health; and
- Sustainable Development
There is enormous potential that exists in “The Majority Tercile” of the demographic pyramid (currently 4.9 billion of the just over 8 billion under 40 but growing exponentially) and local governments can help people who are missed in decision making, including the young.
One of the foci of this conference was to get “more participatory, more representative politics,” leveraging the voting power of younger generations who will inherit the consequences of decisions made (however well-intended) by the over 50s and taking “volunteerism and “social activities and social activism” so that inter-generational citizen action can flourish.
The ECLG shows a way that South-East Europe can mobilise to lead with legitimacy, with a version of capitalism that counts people and nature ahead of profit and new, more inclusive and more sustainable ways of doing business and incentivising at scale and futures-fit investing.
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” — Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize-winning chemist