Understanding Youth Participation

Over the years many different organisations, researchers and governments have tried to define what youth participation is. And there isn't any one single definition of it. This video is about helping you trying to get to an understanding of what youth participation means. We're going to explore a few of the key concepts about it. Why we should do it and what good and bad participation looks like. This word participation, it just means to take part in something and on its own it doesn't tell us very much. But we can tell from that it's about young people being active in doing something. They're shaping, they're doing something with that word. When we start to look at the more conceptual definitions of it, a lot of them will talk about young people taking part in decision-making. Actively expressing views and their voice, and having a power to affect change and either in public policy or society around them. This means that for any process, structure, project or organisation to be described as a participatory one, it needs to have a few things going on for it. Young people need to be active in it. They need to be leading what's going on within this. It needs to enable young people to influence and affect some sort of change in the world around them. Needs to give them a genuine power so they can shape society and influence the decisions that affect their lives. So where does youth participation happen? We can think about it in a few different ways. We can think about how it happens in different spheres of a young person's life. In their private sphere at home among their family and brothers and sisters within the household. A young person playing a part in the decision-making within their home. We can think about participation happening within institutions such as schools or health care or the judiciary and a young person's ability to voice their opinions and their ideas and needs and wants within those decision-making structures. And of course we can think about participation in the broader community and in society as a whole. When we think about political participation or participation within consultations about public policy and how we want our communities to be designed. As you can see participation happens both in private realms within our own small communities and in our households, but also in the public realm in the larger world around us. We also know that participation happens both individually and collectively. A young person on their own can decide to participate in an online consultation to give their own personal view on a particular issue. Collectively young people can decide to join forces together to organise amongst themselves and to create groups or collectives or networks and together they would decide to speak with one voice to represent their collective means and ideas. So why do we even need youth participation? The first thing for me is to understand there's lots of different reasons why we might be concerned with youth participation and why we might promote it. One of the most important ones is, it's a basic human right. Every citizen including young people, including children, has the right to express their views and influence things and to shape the world around them. It's the right of autonomy and we see it defined in things such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). So fundamentally that should be enough reason on its own. But there are also other benefits to it as well. We can think about it in terms of empowerment. Participation can bring power to groups of people who are often marginalised and excluded. Sometimes that means young people as a whole. But sometimes it might mean specific groups such as young people with disabilities or young people from minority backgrounds. And participation is a way of shifting and redressing imbalances of power in our society. Another way we can think about it and another argument that resonates with a lot of policymakers, is it's about efficiency. To put it simply a public institution, maybe it's a school, maybe it's a government, can listen to young people in order to improve the things that it does to make what it's doing more efficient. It's kind of like doing market research in a way. The citizen consumer gives feedback to the state or to civil society on what sort of things it wants to receive from them. You can also think about participation as a form of development. It can be a transformative process for the young people who take part and so you can position it a little bit as an educational practice. And it's a really crucial part of participation that young people learn the skills they need to be active citizens within our societies. How do we know when it's meaningful? Fundamentally participation is about power holders. Those who have the ability to make decisions sharing their power with young people. But how do we measure the quality of this? How do we know when participation is meaningful? There are several different frameworks and models that exist out there. And one of the most famous is Roger Hart's Ladder of Participation. Let's have a look at the Ladder of Participation. It's an eight-level model for children and young people's participation proposed by Roger Hart, but built on other things in the past. The bottom three rungs we see non-participation. This is manipulation, decoration and tokenism. The five participation rungs, which are assigned, consulted, adult initiated, shared decisions with young people, young people initiated and directed, and young people initiated and shared decisions with adults. The bottom three non-participation rungs we often say things that should be avoided. This is where young people aren't genuinely participating. They don't have enough power to affect change to actually influence the decision. And you can criticise a participation activity for being tokenistic of using young people, if it ends up on these three rungs. At the top of the ladder there's all different sorts of spaces, where we see young people and decision-makers start to collaboratively make decision-makers together. It could be young people are being consulted and decision-makers making the final decision. It could be young people and decision-makers sitting down jointly to agree what a decision should be. Or it could be young people just doing things independently and taking decisions for themselves. There's a lot of debates around which levels of participation we should be aiming for. And other people have taken the ladder and laid it on its side and said that there are different ways we should approach it. Hart set us a useful tool for enabling us to think about, when we are doing participation and when we aren't doing participation. And it's Hart what it tells us, that participation is about young people being able to influence decision making and having the power to do that. A really interesting exercise can be to think through where your project or your program is on this ladder. You'll often find it lower than you expect it to be.