Youth-led democracy: An exploration of what space for youth-led change can be opened through a co-designed and embedded approach to participation

Sonia Bussu, Manchester Metropolitan University, s.bussu@mmu.ac.uk James Duggan, Manchester Metropolitan University, J.Duggan@mmu.ac.uk Katy Rubin, Legislative Theatre practitioner, katy@katyrubin.com This paper uses assemblage theory (DeLanda 2016) to develop an analysis of findings from two projects of youth-led participation on mental health policies in Greater Manchester. The two projects, Optimistic Minds (June-September 2022) and Mindset Revolution (November 2022-July 2023) are innovative in several ways. Firstly, rather than seeking to include young people into new structures that are pale imitations of adult-led processes, we create opportunities for them to design their own spaces of participation, grounded in their communities and pre-existing grassroots work. Secondly, while most democratic innovations stop at the point of providing recommendations, we place the emphasis on participatory scrutiny and follow-up. Optimistic Minds develops a roadmap of youth-led change on mental health policies; Mindset Revolution builds on this work to create youth-led spaces of ongoing dialogue between young people, their communities and institutions. Thirdly, most democratic innovations are talk-centric, which can further exclude certain disempowered groups. Instead, we encourage a range of different radically creative methods, including Legislative Theatre (Boal 1996), which gamifies the policy process, while sensitively naming structural racism, sexism, ageism, classism, and ableism as forces in institutional practice. We ground this work in ongoing community work and link it to the Greater Manchester Youth Combined Authority, a youth-led institutional space, to strengthen its role as a bridge between young people’s everyday democracy and political institutions. We understand participation as relational, situated and practice-centred, realised through multiple, overlapping spaces. An assemblage frame can help us assess what space for change can be opened by youth and community-led open and plural experimentation.