Civic engagement or civic participation is any individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern. Civic engagement includes communities working together or individuals working alone in both political and non-political actions to protect public values or make a change in a community. The goal of civic engagement is to address public concerns and promote the quality of the community.

Civic engagement is "a process in which people take collective action to address issues of public concern" and is "instrumental to democracy". Underrepresentation of groups in the government causes issues faced by groups such as minority, low-income, and younger groups to be overlooked or ignored. In turn, issues for higher voting groups are addressed more frequently, causing more bills to be passed to fix these problems.

Civic engagement can take many forms—from individual volunteerism, community engagement efforts, organizational involvement, and electoral participation. These engagements may include directly addressing a problem through personal work, community based, or work through the institutions of representative democracy. Many individuals feel a sense of personal responsibility to actively engage in their community. "Youth civic engagement" has similar aims to develop the community environment and cultivate relationships, although youth civic engagement emphasizes on empowering youth. A study published by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at Tufts University categorized civic engagement into three categories: civic, electoral, and political voice. Scholars of youth engagement online have called for a broader interpretation of civic engagement that focuses on the purpose behind current institutions and activities and includes emerging institutions and activities that achieve the same purposes. A journal published by the Journal of Transformative Education suggests the gap in participation forms between different generations. These civic engagement researchers suggest that the reduction of civic life into small sets of explicitly electoral behaviors may be insufficient to describe the full spectrum of public involvement in civic life.

Civic engagement reform arose at the beginning of the 21st century after Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone brought to light changes in civic participation patterns. Putnam argued that despite rapid increases in higher education opportunities that may foster civic engagement, Americans were dropping out of political and organized community life. A number of studies suggested that while more youth are volunteering, fewer are voting or becoming politically engaged.

The State of the World's Volunteerism Report 2015, the first global review of the power of volunteer voices to help improve the way people are governed, draws on evidence from countries as diverse as Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon and Bangladesh. The United Nations report shows how ordinary people are volunteering their time, energies and skills to improve the way they are governed and engaged at local, national and global levels. Better governance at every level is a pre-requisite for the success of the new set of targets for future international development, the Sustainable Development Goals, which has been agreed upon by the United Nations in September 2015.

At the global level, for instance, a diverse group of 37 online volunteers from across the globe engaged in 4 months of intense collaboration with the United Nations Department of Economic Affairs (UN DESA) to process 386 research surveys carried out across 193 UN Member States for the 2014 UN E-Government Survey. The diversity of nationalities and languages of the online volunteers—more than 65 languages, 15 nationalities, of which half are from developing countries—mirrors the mission of the survey.

Civic engagement, in general, can foster community participation and government involvement, according to ICMA: Leaders at the Core of Better Communities.

The specific benefits of civic engagement are: