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Participation is not something that (young) people do (or not) but is a relationship between the claims for inclusion inherent to their activities in public spaces and the recognition of these claims by others. Starting from a broad definition that avoids reducing participation to formally institutionalized forms, this chapter aims at analysing different practices of young people in public spaces in relation to the tension of representation and conflict: how are these practices structured by whom and what they do represent, by their recognition as legitimate (or not) and whether the social inclusion of their participants is conflictual (or not)? After a theoretical conceptualization between representation and social conflict, two exemplary cases of formal and informal youth participation are presented. In both cases, young people negotiate representation and conflict yet in different ways. This reveals that on the one hand, youth participation can be found in situations of social conflict while facilitating youth participation needs to take dilemmas of representation and conflict into account.

This new edition of A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation brings together work from research and practice to reflect on some of the key developments in the field since the first edition published in 2010. Subtitled ‘Conversations for Transformational Change’, the collection focuses on both ongoing and new discourses that enable us to advance thinking and practice to better understand what it means for participation to be transformational. Featuring all new content, it explores the developments that have been achieved in theory and practice in the last decade as well as the challenges and, indeed, the limitations of dominant participation approaches with children and young people in achieving genuine societal transformation. A key feature of the Handbook is the inclusion of young people as co-authors in many of the chapters. Foregrounding aspects of participation as experienced by diverse groups of children and young people, the book especially illuminates the experiences and perspectives of participation relating to groups of children who face particular challenges, such as displaced children and children living with disabilities and young people from indigenous groups in a range of contexts. The broad spectrum of debates that the text covers will be invaluable in challenging and transforming thinking and practice for a wide range of scholars, practitioners, activists and young people themselves. It will additionally be suitable for use on a wide range of courses including childhood and youth studies, sociology, law, political studies, community development, development studies, children’s rights, citizenship studies, education and social work.

Children take action in contexts and environments that have different histories, cultures and economic and political conditions, all of which affect whether, when and how children’s participation can reach its transformative potential. Capability approaches (CA) focus attention on identifying the personal and environmental conditions that need to be transformed so that everyone can access opportunities. Therefore, these approaches can help create deeper understandings of children and young people’s goals and can help them identify the resources, contexts and actions which might make it possible to achieve their goals. In this chapter, we show how a time-sensitive version of capability approaches can be used by children and their adult allies to engage in discussion and to help focus action on the underlying cultural, economic and political processes affecting their concerns. We provide a set of five co-created questions to apply CA in participatory activities and activism. We then illustrate how to use these questions in two different practice contexts. Our aim is to provide a way of looking into the spaces of children’s participation to explore goals alongside any challenges, to start to understand possible root causes and solutions over the short and longer term so that together we can work towards more fundamental change.

Moving forward thinking and practice in relation to children and young people’s participation and engagement has never been more urgent. This means going beyond simply seeking to involve children and young people in existing structures and processes to realise visions of new democratic alternatives. Faced with barriers and mistrust of mainstream political processes, many young people around the world are seeing new spaces for democracy in local and trans-local communities, nationally, globally and digitally, to speak out, organise and exercise their voice and democratic rights. Irrespective of boundaries and scale, there is a clear groundswell in young people turning away from established democratic structures and processes and engaging in new forms of child and youth-led participation initiatives rooted in everyday struggles and a deeper moral commitment in remaking democracy.

A young researcher and his ‘travelling companions’ reflect on the complex realities of adventures in peer research in Japan and the UK. We explore the barriers and enabling factors in this collective experience, to suggest strategies for international and intergenerational collaboration between young people and academics, highlighting the importance of relationships and attitudes. Unusually, the J-UK project was conceptualised and instigated by a young researcher who, with the support of an established youth research group Ucan, was able to make the idea a reality. The chapter celebrates the messiness of participatory research, recognising the different strengths that everyone brings and the importance of long-term spaces and relationships with children and young people for understanding and following their own research agendas. Sharing the learning from our experiences and strategies to undertake this work, we hope to encourage more inclusive and impactful research through which children and young people can set and pursue their own research agendas.

There is a growing recognition that participation in ‘shadow’ structures such as youth councils, forums and parliaments does not meet all of young people’s needs for action and engagement, and a growing emphasis on finding and recognising opportunities for young people to move out of these structures and initiate their own forms of democratic action for change. This chapter, co-written by academics and young researchers recruited from a youth council, tells the story of an action research project set up under the auspices of PARTISPACE which aimed to learn about the dynamics of self-initiated and autonomous youth participation beyond the confines of formalised youth participation structures. In this chapter, the authors explain what we all brought to the project, reflect from different perspectives on the process we went through, the challenges we encountered, the outcomes we achieved, and make sense of what we, collectively and individually, learned from the experience about different processes of participation.

This paper reflects on our experiences of using participatory action research (PAR) with young people as part of an EU H2020 project exploring the spaces and styles of youth participation in formal, nonformal and informal settings. The paper outlines key tenets of action research and provides a brief review of the literature concerning the use of PAR in youth research. Drawing on three case studies, we provide an honest account of some of the messy realities involved in realizing the promise of participatory action research in practice. The central focus is on how the action research played out in practice, the challenges of undertaking PAR within the context of a funded project with predefined deliverables, the power relationships between researchers and young people and how agendas are negotiated in action research