URBACT Young Citizens’ Project, a best value toolkit for Youth Participation in Urban Policies.
In this toolkit they understand participation as being the active involvement of young people in civic life and see decision-making as central, but not the only feature of active participation. Because definitions of adulthood and youth vary both between member states and social, economic and political contexts, they define a young person as anyone aged between ten and thirty.
This toolkit is intended to provide professionals with tools and examples of good practice to help them structure and evaluate their efforts in the planning, implementation and political enforcement of processes that young people participate in. It is intended to be usable across a wide-range of local authority departments, and aims to demonstrate that young people can and should be involved in decision-making in all areas that impact on them and their communities.
Through their participation young people can contribute significantly to their cities by:
- Developing their own understandings of citizenship, their knowledge, skills, ambitions and confidence.
- Reinvigorating the democratic credentials of city government and bridging the democratic deficit that threatens to undermine local political structures.
- Improving the efficiency of services directed at or affecting them.
What’s in it?
This toolkit is structured around the seven themes mentioned above and questions that have emerged from the evaluation of participation processes within the partner cities. These are:
- Different understandings of participation: Why participation? To what end? What kind of participation processes can city governments initiate? What are the key decision points in starting participation processes?
- Recognising young people’s diversity: Who are ‘Young People’? Young people’s life situations, needs and opportunities differ widely; they cannot be seen as a homogenous group. How should they respond to their diversity?
- Making participation credible to young people: If young people have largely lost faith in formal democratic practices how do they ensure that they take new opportunities seriously?
- Motivation, why should young people want to participate?: While many young people have disengaged they are far from apathetic. What do they need to do to encourage their participation?
- Sustaining Youth Participation: How can they integrate youth participation into different policy-making areas? What structural changes within local authorities are necessary to make it an integral part of local authorities’ working procedures?
- Voices: Young people’s voices must be heard for them to participate in civic life. How do they ensure that they have the space to explain themselves in their own words? How do local authorities ensure they are talking to and not at young people?
- Resources for participation: What resources are necessary to sustain credible opportunities for youth participation and to ensure that their diverse needs and interests are accommodated? How can existing resources be pooled and better used?
Why participation?
At the outset of this project potential partners were invited to join a network in which young people would be empowered to make a contribution to civic life in their cities; to make recommendations to statutory bodies; and help to develop forms of governance that encourage the active participation of young people. The idea behind this was simple: young people are the future and, as such, they should be the source of solutions to local issues. Their responsibility, as democratic cities, is to create opportunities, open up decision-making processes, and provide young people with the tools and support to engage meaningfully with issues that are of importance to them.
Citizens across Europe are increasingly disillusioned with existing democratic processes and young people tend to be both less interested in voting and more distrustful of formal political processes than adults. One result of these trends is that participation has been placed high on the agendas of many policy-makers and institutions. While engaging with young people and promoting their participation is one of the best ways to counter disengagement; offering the rhetoric of participation without ensuring that they are both willing and able to deliver will only lead to further disillusionment. For this reason, it is vitally important that local authorities consider why they want to encourage young people’s participation and what they want to achieve through doing so.
You can download this toolkit for free here.
