MIL policies in Europe 2004-2014 : the uniqueness of a policy and its connection to UNESCO

Since 2004 the European Union (EU) has been committed to the development of media literacy (ML). Examples of this fact can be seen in the Safer Internet, eLearning, MEDIA and Creative Europe programmes -within which different studies have been conducted- and the enactment of different public policies in the field, such as the AVMS (2010) as well as the European Commission (2007; 2009) and the European Parliament's (2006) recommendations on ML implementation. These processes have been influenced and guided by different international organizations such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe. In this regard, the EU has pursued one of the most active ML public policies in the world. The 2014 Paris MIL Forum -sponsored by the EC and UNESCO- was the occasion to visualize the EU's progress. This article describes and analyses, in an objective and systematic manner, what this development means to the creation of innovative ML public policies and educative processes. The result is an interpretative analysis that showcases the principal outcomes of the EU's programmes and actions in the field. In addition, this article examines how recommendations and conclusions from different EU-funded research projects on digital, media and audiovisual literacy have been executed, and describes the European approach in the hope of making it a reference for the development of ML in other regions of the world.