Children's Participation in Global Contexts

Going Beyond Voice

Vicky Johnson, Andy West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317398677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Children's and young people's right to participate has been increasingly acknowledged and taken up internationally, as expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet much of this has focused on collecting children's voices, rather than achieving change, and has met its limits. This book provides an analysis of children's participation in formal, collective and action research processes in six different international settings. It offers a deeper understanding of what helps and facilitates children's and young people's participation through research, evaluation and decision-making to go beyond voice and effect change. This analysis is set in the context of historical and current discourses of participation, the sociology of childhood, contemporary anthropology, children's geography and international development.

Themes addressed include time and processes in children's participation, shifting and multiple identities of children, political and cultural contexts, places and spaces children inhabit, skills and capacities of adults, accountability and power. The analysis promotes an approach to children's participation as relational and collaborative, and will contribute to answering some of the questions facing practitioners and researchers embarking on participatory enquiry with children and young people.

This is an invaluable book for practitioners and for scholars, postgraduates in anthropology, sociology, human geography, childhood studies, development studies, social policy, social work, community work, education, youth work and those with an interest in citizenship, children's rights and human rights. Researchers and practitioners in UN, government and non-government services will also find it applicable to engaging with children and young people.

Part I

Introduction

Following the journey of voice

1Introduction

Following the journey of voice

Introduction

Children’s and young people’s right to participate, as expressed in the United Nations 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), has been increasingly acknowledged internationally. Despite pockets of non-compliance due to conflict and/or complacency, many decision-makers globally have begun to suggest that children should have a voice in decisions affecting their lives, and this has been demonstrated by quotes and pictures scattered throughout international, national and local policy documents. But is there a real change? The question that this book seeks to answer is whether anyone is listening to the voices published and disseminated in various media, for different national and international events. Is anyone responding to and acting on children’s and young people’s perspectives? Is anyone taking the younger generation and their views, ideas and opinions seriously? And if so, in what circumstances? This book looks at the contexts and conditions that have led to more meaningful participation of children and young people.

The almost global ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child provided a mechanism for some governments and especially many national and international non-government organisations (NGOs) to promote the idea of children’s participation in policy and practice. The production and adoption of the UNCRC ran in parallel with academic and theoretical work: at the same time as the convention was being developed through the United Nations, anthropologists such as Judith Ennew, Jo Boyden, Jean LaFontaine, Olga Nieuwenhuys, geographers such as Roger Hart and others turned their attention to the variety of children’s lives and circumstances around the world. This included a series of international workshops on the ethnography of childhood (see Chapter 2). An outcome of these discussions and theorisations was what became known as the ‘new sociology of childhood’, summarised in publications produced at the same time as the UNCRC was adopted (see James and Prout 1990). Following these developments an interest in children and childhood increased or renewed across disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, geography, psychology and others, with the subsequent growth in childhood studies in academic institutions, multi-disciplinary approaches (Alanen 2012) and the launch of international journals early on such as Childhood, and later with different core perspectives such as Children, Youth and Environments and Children’s Geographies, while others took on a more global focus. This was followed by a blossoming of research and studies, often focused on children’s lives and taking account of children’s rights, not only in and about Europe and North America, but increasingly about Africa, Asia and South America, as a growing number of academics from the global South took up an interest in childhood and children’s rights.

The development of this paradigm of childhood encapsulated in the ‘new sociology’ had an international approach from the start, which ran in tandem with the promotion of children’s rights in practice around the world as countries ratified the UNCRC. Early edited studies, such as James and Prout 1990 and Qvortrup et al. 1994, included contributions about and from a variety of places worldwide, paralleled by single country focused works, such as Hill and Tisdall (1997) on the UK. Although named disciplinary works were developed in international studies such as sociology (Corsaro 1997), anthropology (Lancy 2008, Montgomery 2009), geography (Hart 1979, 1997), psychology Woodhead (1990, 1999), these often also had a cross-disciplinary approach with attention to development and globalisation (such as Ansell 2005, Wells 2009). Parallel studies in children and social policy (such as Pringle 1998, Jensen et al. 2004) also including works on children’s rights, took account of changing paradigms. Meanwhile an increasing number of ethnographic and other studies of childhood and youth appeared based on various localities (such as Gottlieb 2004, Hollan and Wellancamp 1996, Katz 2004, Stafford 1995). A renewed interest in youth studies, in the UK following on from the work of the Birmingham school in the 1970s (such as Hall and Jefferson, 1976, Hebdige 1979, McRobbie 1991, Willis 1977), developed internationally, for example in anthropology Amit-Talai and Wulff (1995) and geography Skelton and Valentine (1998). The increase in research brought an increase in research methods (Boyden and Ennew 1997, Christensen and James 2008) that have had to continually adjust to technologies and especially phones and social media that inform children’s lives (Thomson et al. 2018).

Particular and significant aspects of the new paradigm, such as children’s agency including their relational agency (Oswell 2013) have been linked to rights. Meanwhile a framework for the conceptualisation of children’s rights as living rights has also been proposed, based on three key notions: lived experiences in which rights take shape; social justice, in terms of what collective beliefs legitimise and recognise those rights; and the processes of translations between different belief and perspectives on rights and their codification (Hanson and Nieuwenhuys 2013).

Alongside this substantial growth in research, a rich discourse around creative methods and more limited theorisation around childhood and children’s rights, there have been changes in practice in international development work, in local and national youth work, community work and social work in regard to children and young people. This has seen a significant increase in attention to the systems, services and practice of child protection. But it has also provided a huge new and renewed emphasis on children’s participation around the world, including in areas of practice where participation had often already been promoted for example in communities, or in non-government and other organisations, and for and by service-users. The wide range of practice in a range of areas is illustrated in edited collections (such as Crimmens and West 2004, Johnson et al. 1998, Percy-Smith and Thomas 2010), while children’s participation in humanitarian emergencies has also been promoted (West 2015, West and Theis 2007).

At the cusp of these developments in childhood studies, children’s rights, and child protection is children’s participation in research and evaluation, particularly children who are marginalised in their communities or socially excluded and lacking access to services, including those on the move, street connected and/or needing to work.

These developments provide both an interdisciplinary and practice base for analysis and evaluation of children’s and young people’s participation. They also highlight the importance of praxis, taken here as the application and engagement of theory in practice work with children and young people. This means that participation work should be based in the reality of children’s and young people’s lives, which is a basis for a meaningful participation that aims to facilitate and raise views and voices, but also aims to go beyond voice and raise concerns, views, ideas, opinions of children and young people in influencing policy and practice, and which respects and values their decision-making and actions. This emphasis on the importance of children’s and young people’s views, decisions and actions emerges from research across disciplines as well as the UNCRC, but also has a basis in practice.

The promotion of ‘children’s voices’ increased from the early years of the twenty-first century, often taking the form of printed booklets and videos with extensive quotes from children and young people and frequently presented at or released for international and regional policy meetings and conferences. Yet although much time was spent on the processes of collecting voices, the main outcome often appeared to be the product of materials with little attention paid to what influence had been achieved on decisions or contributions to change.

Valuing and respecting children’s and young people’s perspectives requires going beyond tokenistic notions of voice, and focusing not only on listening and hearing, but responding and being accountable. This focus values children’s and young people’s views for the importance of their unique perspectives and potential contributions to understanding social issues, problems and solutions and then emphasises the need to respond appropriately. It should be, but has not always been, evident that children’s views of their lives and interests are crucial in numerous arenas, particularly for example in the broad area of protection from abuse and exploitation, but elsewhere in the provision of services, in communities, schools and other arenas where they live, learn and work.

This book aims to show the conditions in which children and young people participate in decisions affecting their lives, with practical examples from South and East Asia and the UK. Although the authors have also worked elsewhere, such as countries in Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific (and at the time of writing involved in work in Ethiopia and Kenya), projects in South and East Asia and the UK were selected for use here because of long experience and the opportunity for some follow-up ‘revisits’. In this book, using case study research from various locations and projects in Asia and the UK, comparisons are made between contexts and conditions that have led to more meaningful participation of children and young people, analysed and discussed within historical and current discourses of participation, childhood studies and international development. The book shares an analysis of children’s participation in formal, collective and participatory processes in several different settings with a view to extending our learning about what helps or facilitates children’s and young people’s participation in decision-making to effect change, and the implications of this for the development of policy and practice around participation.

Power and going beyond voice

The perspective offered in this book seeks to acknowledge the importance of voice, but to demonstrate through case studies that this approach has met its limits (as suggested by Lundy 2007). This perspective builds on experience and analysis in recent articles and books around participatory spaces (Cornwall 2004, Shier 2010), accountability mechanisms (Lundy 2007) and participation as relational dialogue (Mannion 2010, Percy-Smith 2006). Power has been analysed to some extent with regard to adult researchers working with children (Mayall 2002), and in international participatory development (Cornwall and Gaventa 2006), including adult practitioners associated with children’s organisations (West 2007), but is generally under-theorised in discourses around children’s and young people’s participation. There has been attention to intergenerational relationships in understanding adult–child dynamics (for example Mayall 2002) and the context in which children and young people are growing up in socio-ecological theories of child development and learning (for example Bronfenbrenner 2005, Tudge 2008, Vygotsky 1962).

In this book we suggest that attention should be paid to participation and power in participatory action research in the development of public services for children and in broader social development in communities. The research presented in the book is intended to be of international use in providing a synthesis of learning that is relevant to the academy and practitioner. As the notion of ‘voice’ already has international currency in discourses of rights and participation, this research study will take a step further in developing processes that can result in increasing positive outcomes for children and young people.

Rationale: from tokenism to voice to improved public services, communities and to political/social change

The focus of this book is the participation of children and young people in the governance of local communities and public services including the evaluation of those services, and broader political and social change. Theory and practice will be linked through analysis and discussion of how ideas are put into practice using case studies of participatory processes in rural and urban settings in the UK and Asia. International discourses on children’s rights and participation that have helped to illuminate the participation models and debates and have been relevant in informing practice will be brought to life through stories from girls and boys, men and women in public services and communities in these very diverse and different global contexts.

The need for a means of understanding and capturing children’s and young people’s views, and to include their influence in community development and on public services is becoming more urgent. Concerns have been raised from adults and children alike that children’s participation in public decision-making is often tokenistic, a tick box exercise that fails to deliver any substantive change (Sinclair 2004). Understandably, this perception can deter or ‘turn off’ many wouldbe participants who arguably have better things to do with their time. Debates about children’s participation now stretch beyond the mere recognition that children should participate to demands that participation results (and perhaps as importantly – is seen to result) in ‘political’ change (Tisdall and Davis 2004).

The growth of children’s participation in the UK can be traced through a number of developments including pressure from young people’s user groups (in particular young people in and leaving care) and the rise in the idea of the ‘consumer citizen’ in government policy since the 1990s (Cockburn 2010). The state of children’s participation in particular countries has been explored by academics and practitioners ranging from parts of the UK (Crowley and Skeels 2010) to continental Europe (Crimmens and West 2004) and on to China (West et al. 2007) in addition to the numerous reports and evaluations for national and international NGOs. However, despite attention from academics, policy makers and...