Empowering Youth Voices and moving beyond pseudo-participation

Blog by Ciaran O’Donnell, Eurochild Partnerships and Programmes Coordinator, with contribution from Mór, former member of the Eurochild Children’s Council.

On Tuesday 8 October 2024, I had the opportunity to co-moderate a session alongside Mór, a former member of the Eurochild Children’s Council. Our roundtable, Empowering Youth Voices and Creating Child-Friendly Municipalities – moving Beyond Pseudo-Participation, involved registrants from 30 different countries, with over 50 people in the room together – with a lot of engagement from an audience clearly interested in the topic of how to meaningfully create spaces for child and youth participation.

We had four great speakers, who shared their experiences, milestones, insights, challenges and successes in their efforts to meaningfully involve children and young people in decision-making at local level. With our speakers, we brought together a mix of views from politics, civil society, and municipalities to move beyond the trap of pseudo-participation practices.

The panellists for our roundtable were:

• Gry Jensen, the YES Office, Helsingør in Denmark;
• Fanni Mátyók, Child Citizen project & Józsefváros Municipality in Budapest, Hungary;
• Julia Eikeland, the Norwegian Labour Party Youth Movement, Stavanger, Norway;
• Lukáš Hrošovský, Chairman of NGO ZIPCeM - the umbrella NGO of all youth information centres in Slovakia, from Trnava.

Each speaker shared stories of how they meaningfully involve children and young people in local- and regional-level decision-making. These included good practices, lessons learnt, and reflections from challenges they had encountered in their efforts to bring children and young people’s voices to the forefront.

There were many common challenges, like ensuring equitable access for all children to participate, building understanding and buy-in from professionals and policymakers, avoiding tokenistic engagement, and creating a common, clear, and safe framework for participation.

Despite differing from locality to locality, there were tried and tested solutions too: use of child-friendly processes - like accessible application forms or using participative budgets; laws and policies that mandate participation through structures like councils in schools, local or regional levels; engaging children and young people directly through digital platforms – if that’s where they are, that’s where we need to be; or requiring political quotas for younger candidates in election lists.

But the overarching solution was: if you want to engage children and young people, you need to engage them directly. Don’t just ask them about what they think about politics; ask them how they would improve their neighbourhoods.

We need to create safe spaces to enable meaningful child participation – that means letting go of control, embracing the chaos, as Gry from Denmark put it so well, and co-create something with children and young people.

I’d like to close this blog by giving the final words to my co-moderator Mór, to share his takeaways from our roundtable:

'I really enjoyed the event, as all of the speakers were truly accomplished. I was very impressed with their speeches and inputs on the questions posed by us and the audience. I left the event happily knowing that there are people who are fighting the good fight outside the people I know.'

Looking for more information?

These past years, Eurochild has worked to pilot and scale-up meaningful child participation practices at local level to catalyse lasting change for children and young people in their local communities. Check out the below links to learn more about our work:

• our Democratic Activation of Youth (DAY) Project in Naples, Italy
• our Child Citizens Project in Budapest, Hungary 
• Ciaran O’Donnell, Eurochild Partnerships and Programmes Coordinator