Youth participation – where do we go next?

Many youth participation initiatives are built around enabling young people to influence policy and decision-making. Most of our thinking about how to do this has focused on how to engage with young people. Less attention has been paid to how we engage with policymaking. To maximise the influence young people, have, there is a need for us to think more clearly about how to connect our activities with young people more effectively with policy making and all its complexities. We also need to get better at giving young people feedback on how and where their voices have created political change. This is crucial for building young people’s faith in democratic processes and structures.

Most of our formats for youth participation are based around in-depth work with small groups, or slightly larger events such as youth conferences. These opportunities reach tens or hundreds of young people at a time. As a result, there are many thousands of young people in the wider population who simply don’t have access to these types of opportunities. We need to get better at thinking about how we plan and design large participative systems that can be accessible to entire populations of young people. This means making participation opportunities visible to the entire youth population, with the chance for some young people to be involved in depth, and the chance for many thousands more to be involved on a more ad-hoc or intermittent basis. It is unrealistic to think that all young people want to commit to something like a steering group or co-production project. We need to create other types of opportunities for wider populations to be involved on a less time-intensive basis.

Research on the impact of citizenship education shows there is still more work to do in making democracy education more persuasive. There is also a need to make more use of formal education, which, unlike non-formal education, reaches nearly all young people through its compulsory nature. At the moment, our educational approaches and systems are not effective enough at building support and trust in our democratic values, systems and ideals. We need to find ways to remind newer generations how great democracy truly is and to inspire continued support in our systems of governance.

As part of our work to better engage with policy making, we need to find ways to consider how polices in all fields can be developed in a way that does not unfairly prioritise older generations at the expense of younger or future generations. This means developing tools such as youth tests and encouraging the spread of youth mainstreaming. With these approaches, we can enable young people to scrutinise new policies and encourage policymakers outside the youth field to further consider the rights and views of young people when they create policy.