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Revisiting young people’s participation: an introduction

Maria Bruselius-Jensen, E. Kay M. Tisdall and Ilaria Pitti

Over 30 years after the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was ratified by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1989, young people’s active citizenship and participation rights have gained increased attention in both academia, policy and practice (Westwood et al, 2014; Gal and Duramy, 2015; McMellon and Tisdall, 2020). In particular, young people’s civic participation is promoted at local, national and regional levels through such organisations as the European Union, UNICEF and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Young people’s participation has become a major rights issue and one gaining increasing policy and practice importance.

While the UNCRC addresses the human rights of children under the age of 18, attention to participation also extends to older young people. Political institutions, research and society are concerned about young people’s societal engagement, carried by fears that new generations of European youth are unengaged and disinterested in politics and have lost trust in democratic institutions (Loncle et al, 2012), and that this will lead to a crisis in democracy. Such a deficit perspective has been counteracted by recent research, which demonstrates that young people are often not uninvolved but they use forms and means other than formal participation to engage in society and to influence politics (Quintelier, 2007; Pohl et al, 2020). Whether constructing youth participation as in crisis or changing, institutions from social work to education are investing in supporting, facilitating and educating young people to be engaged societally as the ‘citizens of tomorrow’ (Walther et al, 2020).

Young people of recent generations have grown up not only with the right to be consulted, but also with multiple initiatives to support their democratic education and facilitate their engagement (Taru et al, 2014). Key actors such as municipalities, institutions and NGOs advocate giving ‘voice’ to young people and consulting them on matters that concern their lives (Kjellander et al, 2016). However, professionals can be unsure about how to include young people in change and decision making, while institutional structures may create barriers as well as opportunities (Tisdall et al, 2014). With participation activities proliferating, the book is timely in assessing the ways in which young people experience such activities, their transformative potential both personally and for society, and the ways in which adults and organisations do or do not support such participation.

This book comes at a time of considerable upheaval and change for young people in Europe. The 2008 global financial crisis has led to a rise of youth unemployment in many European countries, while the challenges fostered by massive migrations and climate change are putting pressure on political and economic systems. This complexity is further exacerbated by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. While young people have so far been relatively spared from serious illness, the long-term effects of this new crisis on the European economies and labour markets are likely to hit them harder, primarily in terms of accessing stable jobs and social security. The pandemic crisis could foster another global economic crisis. In turn, this could lead national governments to adopt austerity measures similar to those enacted in response to the 2008 global financial crisis, limiting education, youth work and other social services that could support young people.

The current scenario results in uncertainty for young people, but it also creates spaces for experimentation and innovation through participation.

This book showcases original research evidence and analysis, arising from a network of European social science researchers from childhood and youth studies. It revisits how, under what conditions and for what purpose young people¹ – in different contexts – participate in making decisions and foster changes on issues that concern them and their communities. It does so by drawing on research undertaken after the 2008 financial crisis but before the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters are aligned by a shared focus on the interplay between the concepts of youth, participation and inequality. The book provides an opportunity to update these three long-standing and central concepts for young people’s participation, and to critically consider them in the current environment. Thus, the book both contributes new insights for contemporary young people’s participation and strengthens the core concepts for participatory research and practice. The following sections further explore the concepts of participation, youth and inequality and their application in this book.

Participation

To promote young people’s participation, formal structures have been established in numerous countries, from pupil councils within schools (Cross et al, 2014) to children’s or youth parliaments (Cushing and van Vliet, 2017). Examples abound of young people being invited to comment on community, service and policy developments, at local, regional and national levels; sometimes their involvement goes further, in forms of co-design and co-production (Tisdall et al, 2014). Participation projects and activities have proliferated, from young people influencing their local contexts (for example, care-experienced young people influencing local authority services²), to young people speaking to international decision makers on issues ranging from child marriage to equal opportunities.³ The recent profile of young people’s activism in climate change, including Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN General Assembly⁴ and the widespread marches of school children and youth (Sengupta, 2019), have gripped the public imagination and flooded both traditional and social media. Young people’s participation is now high profile for the public, as well as being of policy, practice and research interest.

Despite or perhaps because of its popularity, participation as a concept is used widely but differently, with no consensus across literatures, research and policies on its definition. A very basic definition of ‘participation’ – for example, ‘the fact that you take part or become involved in something’ in the Cambridge English Dictionary⁵ – is very generalised, lacks links to decision making and impact, and thus provides only a starting point from a rights perspective. Inspired by Cotta (1979), the concept of participation is defined here as having two interconnected meanings. On the one hand, participation does refer to ‘taking part’ in something and particularly to taking part in civic and political activities. On the other hand, participation refers to ‘being part’ of something, included in a society with a series of rights and possibilities. Through a wide variety of case examples, this book demonstrates how the two dimensions of participation are interconnected in young people’s possibilities of being part of and taking part in different welfare societies.

Youth

As a second focus, the book interrogates the conditions of ‘youth’ and ‘being young’ in contemporary Europe and how these impact on young people’s practices and possibilities of participation. The book starts from the premise that ‘youth’ is first and foremost a social category (Bourdieu, 1993) whose boundaries and contents are continuously defined and redefined in the evolving interactions between structural forces and individual agency (Archer, 2003). Further, ‘being young’ is conceptualised as a status that entails specific opportunities, constraints and expectations of behaviour that emerge from and are negotiated in the interactions between young individuals and their surrounding social contexts (Furlong, 2009; Kelly and Kamp, 2014).

Social sciences have analysed youth through different theoretical frameworks. The transition perspective (Furlong, 2009) has understood youth as a life stage traditionally meant to prepare young individuals to acquire adult roles in society through a series of ‘modern’ rites of passage that young people have to face: namely – for Western societies – completing education, finding a job, moving out of the family home and starting a family of their own (Woodman and Bennet, 2015). Transition analyses have highlighted how growing social mobility has increased the transitions young people go through and the speed by which they take place (Furlong et al, 2011; Rosa, 2013). A generational perspective recognises certain similarities across young people in different societies but also how individual young people can experience these differently in their particular contexts (Woodman and Wyn, 2015). Lastly, the cultural perspective highlights not only the variety of youth cultures, but also the cultural practices and strategies through which young people cope with and make sense of their positions in society (Hall and Jefferson, 1975; Woodman and Bennet, 2015). Despite their differences, these three perspectives within youth studies point out how youth must be understood in relation to the young person’s specific life conditions and surrounding social contexts. With that in mind, the book has sought to give space to diversity among young people. Contributions depict an array of different youth conditions: for example, young people with disabilities, young asylum seekers, and young people living in rural areas. The stories consider the multifaceted and differentiated meanings that ‘being young’ can have to young people and how differences in conditions can affect young people’s participation.

The ‘adult world’ intervenes to shape youth through definitions and discourses. Legal definitions can define the passages from youth to adulthood, with implications for young people’s participation opportunities: for example, a minimum age for voting rights. Adults’ understandings of youth can define the appropriateness of a young person’s participation. Such definitions are part of an intergenerational struggle, where young people and their expressions are often portrayed in negative terms, such as being passive, unengaged and self-centred or dangerous and threatening (Pickard and Bessant, 2019; Walther et al, 2020). The book therefore pays attention to how youth participation is formed in the interactions between young people, adults and institutions. Chapters consider how particular understandings and discourses of ‘youth’ shape what counts and is discounted as young people’s participation. They consider what spaces young people are invited to engage with, which ones they are excluded from, and which ones young people carve out for themselves.

Inequality

The third concept scaffolding this book is inequality. A long tradition in social sciences and related studies has grappled with the concept and manifestations of inequality (Castel, 2003; Dorling, 2015). For this book, inequality is the structuring of advantaged and disadvantaged life chances and is the effect of an uneven distribution of opportunities among the members of a given society (Rawls, 1971; Nussbaum, 1995). The unequal distribution of life chances within a given society produces social hierarchies and different degrees of integration for its members, who can occupy more ‘central’ or more ‘peripheral’ positions in relation to civil, political and social spheres (Castel, 2003). When it comes to youth, social sciences have analysed structural disparities in young people’s possibilities to meet basic needs such as food and housing (Green, 2017), in access to education (Heathfield and Fusco, 2016), and in health and other services (Alemán-Díaz et al, 2016). Research shows how dimensions of class (Threadgold, 2017), gender (Thompson, 2011), ethnicity (Harris, 2012) and place (Cuervo and Miranda, 2019) interact with age in creating more or less ‘marginal youths’.

When studying youth and participation, the intergenerational dimension is central (Bates and Riseborough, 1993; Furlong, 2009; Woodman and Leccardi, 2015) and underlines the unequal distribution of resources between co-existing adult and youth generations. Indeed, studies indicate that in Western contexts young people born after 1980 might become the first generation who can expect to attain lower economic living standards than previous generations (Bessant et al, 2018). Thus, the intergenerational perspective recognises the systematic disparities in the distribution of economic resources and political power between generations (Pickard and Bessant, 2019).

While the distribution of material resources represents the most visible form of inequality, disparities also occur in relation to the different possibilities that individuals and groups have to participate – both to take part in and being part of their societies. From this perspective, inequality refers to a set of systematic disparities in an individual’s or group’s abilities: to receive recognition; to influence others’ behaviours in order to produce advantages for themselves and the groups they belong to; and to have control of the choices concerning their present and their future (Saraceno, 2006). Adopting this perspective of inequality facilitates consideration of both ‘traditional’ and ‘emerging’ disparities in young people’s participation.

The perduring effect that factors such as class, education and gender have in structuring young people’s possibilities of participation have been extensively demonstrated by literature. Young people with lower-class backgrounds systematically show lower levels of participation in both institutional and unconventional forms of participation (Marien et al, 2010) and experience difficulties in obtaining recognition based on their modes of expression (Pitti et al, 2020). This also seems to be the case for young people from ethnic minorities (Harris, 2008). Many of the chapters included in this book contribute to the analysis of these traditional effects of social inequalities on youth participation. However, attention is also given to less explored forms of inequalities in the participatory sphere. Literature has shown how spatial dimensions are relevant in shaping young people’s capabilities to participate (Holloway et al, 2018). Several studies have highlighted the different possibilities of engagement accessible to urban and rural young people (Farrugia, 2019), while temporal aspects are relevant in explaining young people’s involvement (Feixa et al, 2016), especially in relation to forms of engagement that require a relevant investment of time to be fulfilled (such as volunteering or activism) (Pitti, 2018). The book explores the relationships between participation and both traditional and emerging forms of inequality.

Participation can be a means through which young people seek to cope with the different forms of inequality they encounter in their lives (Loncle et al, 2012). However, some practices and logics of youth participation produce and reproduce forms of inequality that hinder young people’s full engagement and their rights to participate (Batsleer et al, 2020). The book provides a critical assessment of how specific ways of structuring and promoting youth participation can create ‘hierarchies of engagement’ and systematic forms of exclusion, and accentuate certain inequalities. It also examines participation’s possibilities for inclusion, innovation and change.

Outline of the book

This book arose out of network meetings in 2018 and 2019 with scholars across Europe and from different fields in the social sciences, who shared a strong interest in strengthening young people’s inclusion, recognition and participation on issues that matter to them. With evidenced examples and substantive research from these authors, the book challenges current policies and practices on young people’s participation and asks, as a result, how young people can be supported to take part in social change and decision making and what can be learnt from young people’s own initiatives.

The first part of the book contains three chapters written by and with young people who explore the experiences and the outcomes of their own participation. Chapter 2 is written by Alessio La Terra, a young activist involved in the leftist social movement organisation Làbas, based in Bologna. The chapter considers the story of Quaderni Urbani, a self-organised cultural project that, through art, is seeking to develop and share radical messages and political activism on migration, housing and other social issues. The chapter focuses on the practice of ‘cultural activism’ and discusses the opportunities and challenges of combining radical political activism and cultural engagement. Chapter 3 learns from experiences in Scotland, where young people involved with Young Edinburgh Action (YEA), the city of Edinburgh’s youth participation strategy, undertook participatory action projects and, subsequently, went on to co-produce a UK-wide network to improve young people’s mental health (TRIUMPH). The chapter is co-authored by Katherine Dempsie and Myada Eltiraifi, two young people involved in first YEA and then TRIUMPH, along with Christina McMellon, who supported their involvement throughout. Chapter 4 is written by Darpan Raj Gautam and Barwaqo Jama Hussein, who took part in a project entitled Part of the Community, organised by the NGO Action Aid Denmark. The project aimed to develop fora for young people in deprived neighbourhoods, so young people could share their experiences of inequality and, together, gain influence and democratic experiences. These three chapters provide insights into the forms of and motivations for young people’s engagement, as well as some of the difficulties these young people encountered in their participation journeys.

In Part II, four chapters revisit youth participation and inequality by investigating contemporary conditions and forms of youth participation. The section examines how young people’s participation has been affected and shaped by broader changes in the economy, technological innovation, regimes and policies. Chapter 5 develops a context-based definition of social participation, to then consider the diverse forms of participation and factors that influence young people’s agency and ability to engage. The authors find that experiencing inequalities seems to spur, rather than dissuade, young people’s engagement. Chapter 6 revisits young people’s political engagement, taking a historical perspective from the 1970s on youth rebellions and reflecting on surveys with young people via the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. Chapter 7 focuses on young people’s digital citizenship. Drawing on cross-European quantitative data and qualitative findings from Estonia, it explores how young people become informed, take a stand and take action through digital participation. The authors discuss how digital participation can also create inequalities of participation between groups of young people. Chapter 8 introduces the term ‘project regime’ to demonstrate how young people’s participation is often facilitated and organised as projects, and how the managerial orders and logics of projects profoundly affect the conditions for young people’s participation. Drawing on two case studies, the authors shows how the orders and logics of project organisation decide which, how and to what aims young people can participate in change and decision making within these project-based spaces for participation.

In Part III, chapters focus on how young people’s participation takes different forms in different contexts. Each chapter is based on a study or project with a specific group of young people, where young people seek to make changes for their lives and others. Chapter 9 considers five cases of youth activism in political squats, to demonstrate how young people’s activism aims to counteract austerity measures and economic crisis in Italy. The chapter focuses on young people’s collective reactions to inequality through self-organisation and prefigurative actions. Chapter 10 likewise looks at young people’s self-organisation in public spaces. The author explores how young people seek to turn abandoned urban spaces into spaces of participation and the accompanying challenges for the young people when they self-organise. In Chapter 11, the space for participation changes from a public to an individual and institutional space, with an analysis of how young people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder struggle in their meetings with their statutory caseworkers. The study shows the young people’s struggles to be considered active participants in decision making concerning crucial matters in their lives. Chapter 12 describes how young asylum seekers in the UK worked collectively to make their experiences heard and visible within a hostile and alienating public space.

Part IV addresses how young people’s participation can be supported through specific approaches and methodologies within research and practice. Research on young people’s participation has a strong tradition of developing methodologies that seek to enable young people to express and explore their views (Pink, 2007). This section builds on that tradition, to consider which methodologies appear effective in supporting young people’s participation – and potential innovations. Chapter 13 reviews the pernicious challenges for young people’s participation activities, such as tokenism, lack of impact on decision making, and criticisms that the young people involved are unrepresentative. It then explores examples of youth-led research, which address many of these challenges, due to young people being recognised as generators of knowledge, with legitimacy and credibility. Chapters 14 and 15 both present and explore new methodological approaches to support young people’s participation in research. Chapter 14 discusses the methodology ‘journey mapping’ and illustrate how the methodology can support young people to form and share their often multifaceted experiences when taking part in participatory projects. Chapter 15 explores how film making can provide a playful framework for young people to express their non-verbal, embodied and visual experiences living in rural settings. Finally, Chapter 16 draws on the methodologies of participatory action research and critical utopian action research to argue for transformative learning to be central to participation processes for young people at risk of marginalisation. The chapter underlines that participatory processes necessitate reciprocal learning for both the young people and adults involved and that this, in turn, redresses power imbalances and engenders co-inquiry and mutual reciprocity in relationships of respect. The editors’ concluding remarks in Chapter 17 complete the book.

Notes

1Broadly, the book address young people between the ages of 12 and 24 (see www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/youth/youth-definition and www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/youth/fact-sheets/youth-definition.pdf [Accessed 18 January 2019]).

2See www.lifechangestrust.org.uk/care-experienced-young-people/champions-boards [Accessed 11 December 2019].

3See www.un.org/development/desa/youth/news/2019/10/youth-delegates

4See www.youtube.com/watch?v=11FCyUB81rI [Accessed 11 December 2019].

5See https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/participation [Accessed 31 January 2020].

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