Citizens in the making? Participation of children and youth at the local level in Poland and Finland

Citizens’ participation has changed significantly over the past decades. The shift from traditional government to governance has resulted in the inclusion of new stakeholders into public decision-making. Initially, they were representatives of business and NGOs, and in recent years also the so-called hard-to-reach groups, including the elderly, people with disabilities, youth, and immigrants. The experience of many local governments indicates at the same time that the involvement of so called hard-to-reach groups is not an easy and smooth process. Ones of these groups are undoubtedly children and youth. The situation seems to be motivated by two main reasons. On the one hand, the way of thinking about the involvement of youth, including the belief that they rather should be seen but not heard, constitutes a significant barrier. Against this background, a few issues are of importance. First, formalized, based mainly on representative democracy, decision-making assumes that the possibility for legitimate democratic participation should be attributed to people who possess certain features, e.g., age, experience, or specific types of knowledge. In this context, the political agency of children and youth is excluded from the realm of politics as their opinions are not considered politically relevant in adult terms (Bosco 2010; Häkli, Kallio 2018; Tisdall, Davis 2004). Second, what in a way results from the above is that young people are perceived as laypersons, without sufficient social and political background who are enabled to properly voice their own views (McKay 2014; Jankowiak 2017). This positions them as objects rather than subjects of policymaking, which can be exemplified by the fact that the majority of public authorities as well as non-governmental organizations work for children and young people rather than with children and young people. Consequently, inclusive governing is significantly limited. On the other hand, involving youngsters in governance requires a proper design of instruments and methods allowing for their actual incorporation into deciding. Here all the stages from searching for ideas, through implementation and evaluation of undertaken actions should be covered. This, however, creates important challenges for elected politicians, bureaucrats as well as adult citizens that often leads to a situation when participative agenda is built on pseudoforms of involvement, such as manipulation, decoration, or tokenism. In all of them, youngsters have no or very little control over what they do or how they participate (Hart 1992, 1997; see also Arnstein 1969). The aim of the paper is to identify and analyze the forms of participation designed for children and youth in Poland and Finland. The article examines both instruments embedded in the law, such as youth councils as well as democratic innovations as for example youth participatory budgeting. The paper presents preliminary findings of the project Silent witnesses or active participants? Patterns of children and youth engagement in local governance in Poland and Finland funded by National Science Poland (no 2021/41/B/HS5/02899).