National hubs supporting local actors in P/CVE – practitioners’ insights, November 2021

Local actors play a key role in effective efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism. When it comes to addressing challenges of radicalisation and violent extremism, local municipalities and authorities together with and supported by national governments, often bear the primary responsibility. In past years, a variety of local approaches has emerged across Europe, each of them informed by different local settings, governance structures, resources and needs assessments and all of them guided by different national prevention strategies.

Multi-agency collaboration and locally owned approaches are increasingly seen as essential in developing effective P/CVE measures across the spectrum of prevention, intervention, exit-work, and rehabilitation and reintegration. When listening to practitioners in P/CVE, it is evident that working with P/CVE has indeed undergone quite a development over the past decade or so – mainly a positive one.

From the practitioners’ point of view, this appears to be quite true – both when it comes to the development of the support from national hubs to local P/CVE, as well as for how the work is organised and carried out on a local level. Both national hubs and local P/CVE actors have gained and stored crucial experience and knowledge in the field of P/CVE over a number of years.