The aim of the European Youth Work Agenda (EYWA) is to promote the development of youth work in Europe by creating a common strategic framework to improve understanding and a more robust, coordinated approach to the implementation of different youth work activities. Actors are involved in measures and projects that implement the EYWA at the European level and in individual European states. The “Mapping European Youth Work Ecosystems” project examines which European actors are involved in implementing the EYWA, how they work together, the measures and activities they are using to implement the EYQA, and the extent to which these actors’ activities are coordinated. The project aims to promote the European youth work ecosystem – i.e. the complex European network of actors, topics, processes and structures as well as the associated activities and measures to implement the EYWA – and analyse its interactions. The study builds on the theoretical principles of social networks analysis (Stegbauer 2008). In this lecture, speakers will explore the (political) background to the project and its theoretical basis. They will also present the project’s methodology. It is based on a mixed methods approach in which standardised surveys are combined with guided interviews. The Delphi method (Häder 2000) is also used as a means of having the research outcomes validated by actors from the fields of politics and practice. Finally, the speakers will present recent research outcomes on the implementation of the Bonn Process (Hofmann-van de Poll/Kovacic 2022) and the preliminary results of this project.