EL ÁNGEL DE LA GUARDA

The concept of power and the manner in which it is exercised in the decision- making processes that the children’s forums in the research sites are engaged with (for example in the local municipality in ASHA and Lamberton; in the school in Marlings and the INGO in CHiP) is central to this study. But power and its application is rarely straightforward. Thus, notwithstanding the opportunities that policy network theorists see for non-state actors to engage in the policy making process, other theorists argue that beyond the rhetoric, new governance spaces are still inscribed with the state agenda. In the context of community participation, Taylor (2007:314) describes what she calls the ‘squeezing’ of new governance spaces where responsibilities are pushed down to communities and individuals while at the same time control is retained at the centre ’through the imposition and internalisation of performance cultures that require ‘appropriate’ behaviour’.

Lupton et al., (1998:48) explain how applying a more nuanced and multi- dimensional conception of power illustrates the limitations of public participation and reveals the subtle ways in which the state wields its power:

Forms of public participation may be established which appear to give people influence when viewed in terms of single-dimension explanations of power, but are actually used to prevent certain issues from being discussed. By channeling interaction to a limited agenda, attention can be diverted away from areas of potential conflict that those in power wish to avoid. Seen in this way, participatory mechanisms can serve as a means of social control by preventing challenges to the status quo. By engaging people and giving them responsibility in a particular area of policy or service, moreover, the process of public participation may also serve to contain criticism and unrest by helping the public to appreciate the realities of government and/or implying public support for the actions taken.

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Similar points about the potential for participatory mechanisms to serve as a means of social control and exclusion are made in Milbourne’s (2009) study into work with disengaged young people at a community level in the UK and also by Taylor (2007) who looks at participation in community development and Kothari (2001) in relation to participatory approaches in international development. The data analysis was informed by these nuanced understandings of power as played out in each of the fieldwork sites. The analysis particularly addressed who was enabled to participate in the children’s forums, who was excluded (or excluded themselves) and how the different forums worked to recruit a range of different interests rather than just ‘the usual suspects’ (Alderson, 2000 and Cairns, 2006).

Also explored was how agendas were set and by whom and the purposes that the stakeholders invested in each of the children’s forums. For example, later chapters will show how each of the study sites used different mechanisms to involve children. The school council (Marlings) and youth forum (Lamberton) in Wales comprised elected representatives, with the latter working to ensure that children’s groups in the poorest communities elected around a third of the youth forum’s representatives. Whilst some of the children who were members of the INGO advisory panel (CHiP) had been elected by some of their peers, most were selected by international staff in the country of origin according to very fluid and pragmatic criteria. The Neighbourhood Children’s Parliaments in India (ASHA) were in principle open to all children aged 6-18 but in reality they struggled to involve adolescent girls (because parents were concerned about protecting their purity) and adolescent boys (who were apparently too busy studying for exams).

Cornwall’s (2004) conceptualisation of a spectrum of participation ‘spaces’ provided useful and related ideas to help make sense of the power dynamics between children and adults that were reflected in my data. She contrasts the relationship between spaces created through an invitation to participate and those that people create for themselves (Cornwall, 2008). ‘Invited’ spaces are described as structured and owned by those who provide them, no matter how participative they are in practice. Spaces that people create for themselves have a very different character

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with considerable differences in status and power to the ‘invited spaces’. Most often they consist of people who come together because they have something in common, rather than representing different stakeholders or different points of view. These kinds of spaces can be important as sites where groups ‘can gain confidence and skills, develop their arguments and gain solidarity and support that being part of that group can offer’ (Cornwall, 2008:275). Gaventa (2004) and Shier (2010) suggest that progress is most likely at the interstices between the popular and invited spaces. ‘Navigating the intersections of relationships’, Gaventa (2004:38) argues, may ‘in turn create new boundaries of possibility for action and engagement’.

It will be seen that the children’s forums in the four case studies reflect a range of different types of ‘invited’ spaces: a youth forum set up and owned by the local authority (Lamberton); a school council set up and owned by the school (Marlings); an advisory ‘governance’ group set up by an international NGO (CHiP) and Neighbourhood Children’s Parliaments set up by an NGO in India. Later chapters will consider the relationships between these ‘invited’ spaces and the ‘popular’ spaces that the children inhabited although access to the latter spaces was restricted in the majority of the fieldwork sites for practical reasons.

This concludes the review of theoretical perspectives concerned with public participation set within the context of the move from government to governance. The final section of this chapter summarises the key learning from this review and denotes the theoretical approaches concerned with governance, policy making and the exercise of power that informed this research. It reflects on the tensions inherent in the concepts of citizen participation and participatory governance and highlights important research questions and themes that have informed the study.

2.5 Conclusion

The methodological approach employed in this study was to use the reviews of previous theoretical and empirical scholarship (in this chapter and the next) to

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inform the definitive research questions and themes; the operationalisation of the key concepts; the choice of the data collection methods; and the concepts and frameworks used in the data analysis. This concluding section summarises the key theoretical perspectives concerned with service user and community participation that guided my empirical inquiry and in particular the data analysis. Data were analysed and reported on with particular reference to these more promising ideas and theoretical perspectives throughout section two of this thesis.

As will be discussed in detail in chapter four, evaluating public participation and assessing the outcomes of the participation process is notoriously challenging. Taylor (2003) suggests that the lack of monitoring and evaluation on the impact of public participation is to do with the conceptual clash between citizenship and consumerism which is being exposed as participation becomes more widespread and sites of resistance are revealed. The potential for navigating the tensions that result from this clash, to allow for action and meaningful citizen engagement in policy-making is a key theme that was explored throughout the research. The review has dispelled any thoughts that it might have been possible to study a linear, rational policy-making process, with a beginning, middle and an end and instead it has drawn attention to horizontal as well as vertical perspectives of the policy process. It has highlighted a number of useful theories for explaining and understanding policy change or resistance in response to children’s influence, including governance and pluralism theories, and concepts of policy networks, interest groups, insiders and outsiders and the valued resources of authority, expertise and order.

The review has also demonstrated the importance of exploring the exercise of power within the process of participating and the links between process and discernible outcomes. The key issue of interest here that divides many analysts is whether the changes in the way we are governed in the UK has led to a situation where citizens are more empowered and enabled to influence the public policy agenda or whether the displacement of centralised control has just been replaced by more dispersed, fragmented but still state-controlled power across new sites of

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action. Charting and analysing the power relationships and the interaction between the children’s forums and the adult stakeholders is at the heart of this inquiry.

The thesis also draws on post-structural theories to illustrate that while the power of the state may well have been ‘hollowed out’ and dispersed through a plurality of agencies (and this is an hypothesis explored in later chapters), attention was also directed to how knowledge and power continues to regulate social activity through the self-disciplining of actors, be they citizens, workers, or organisations. In this way the study design combines the strengths of governance and pluralism theories while giving credence to the nuanced exercising of power by the state, institutions and the agency of individual participants (Newman, et al., 2008). Devoting attention to understanding participation as a governing strategy will help to explain and better understand the ambiguous mix of empowerment and co-option experienced by children (Cotmore, 2004).

The review in this chapter has shown how, as Tisdall and Bell (2006) suggest, the debates around the changing forms of governed and governance, policy networks and new institutionalism, social capital and civil society, provide useful ways of understanding children’s participation in ‘public’ decision-making. The next chapter will review additional theoretical perspectives concerned with the related concept of children as ‘policy actors’, that is, a legitimate group in policy making processes, acting within new governance spaces. It also includes a review of key empirical work on the impact of children’s public participation on policy-making although here too, there is a dearth of previous research. The reasons for this apparent gap are explored further in chapter four when reflecting on the methodological challenges of evaluating public participation and in chapter five when the data analysis focuses on the objectives the ‘owning’ organisations invest in structures to facilitate children’s participation in designing, delivering and evaluating public policy.

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Chapter 3: Children as Policy Actors

3.1 Introduction

The previous chapter explored the concepts of governance and public participation and highlighted the importance of exploring how power is exercised in the decision- making processes that the children’s forums are seeking to influence. Chapter two concluded by highlighting the tensions between positions which see public participation as a means of empowering citizens, of re-building trust and renewing democracy and those that see public participation as just another means by which the state exerts control of its citizens in an increasingly complex world. This chapter explores additional perspectives on children as ‘policy actors’ and relates the tensions between participation as control and participation as empowerment to current discourses around childhood and children’s rights.

In chapter two it was noted that the four forums included in my study are all examples of ‘invited’ spaces, that is they are structures set up by organisations run by adults to facilitate children’s participation in governance and in the improvement of public services (Cornwall, 2004). The two forums in Wales, a school council in a primary school (Marlings); a youth forum set up by a local authority (Lamberton) are broadly representative of structures for children aged 4-11 and 11-25 respectively, established in the majority of schools and local authorities in Wales under direction of regulations and guidance from the Welsh Government (WAG, 2011 and 2005). Similar structures have been set up in many schools and local authorities across other parts of the UK although not on a mandatory basis (Turkie, 2010; O’Toole and Gale, 2006). There are, as shall be explored in this chapter, ambiguities within these ‘top down’ deliberative participatory structures whereas Cockburn (2010) reminds us, enthusiasm for citizenship can be weak, based on an undemocratic education system, a short term ‘consumerist’ notion of participation and ‘an emphasis on partnership rather than an expression and contestation of difference’ (2010:306).

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It will be seen that the international case studies in my sample, the children’s advisory group that meets annually to advise senior managers and trustees in CHiP and the Neighbourhood Children’s Parliaments in India are also examples of ‘invited’ spaces although the children’s parliaments operating as they do at village level should be understood as strongly community-based. Both of the international forums can also be seen as manifestly linked to the global ‘governance’ agenda. As will be explored in chapter five, the motivations of the NGOs setting up these forums are rooted in international concerns to enhance accountability and improve governance arrangements through the inclusion of civil society.

The contribution this chapter makes to the thesis is four fold. Firstly, it positions the conceptualisation of children’s participation and the development of policy and practice around children’s ‘public’ participation in both an historical and a ‘new‘ governance context especially in relation to Wales where devolution has, it is argued, opened up new opportunities for public participation (see Chaney et al., 2001). Secondly, the chapter explores the discourse around childhood, children’s rights and children’s citizenship, reviewing selected theoretical perspectives on children’s ‘public’ participation and their relevance to the key research questions and themes. Thirdly, it reviews the most promising theories and models to describe, explain or understand the processes and outcomes of children’s ‘public’ participation in terms of their utility for analysing the case studies. Fourthly, the chapter includes a review of the methodological approaches of selected empirical studies on the impact of children’s participation in public decision-making.

The learning from these sources will help further refine and clarify the conceptual focus of the study and identify useful analytical frameworks as well as inform, more broadly, my choice of research methods. The search procedures for the literature review were described at the start of chapter two but it should be noted that the search on children’s public participation focused on English speaking sources that were cognate to the UK and to the broad international development context.

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The next section sets children’s public participation in an historical and political context. Thereafter section 3.3 considers children as rights holders, active citizens and policy actors in the context of new governance and devolution, drawing on different perspectives on childhood, children’s rights and children as citizens. Section 3.4 reports on the practice of children’s participation with reference to definitions and conceptual models from the literature. Section 3.5 explores the impact of children’s collective participation in shaping public policy and public services with reference to empirical work. The chapter concludes with a summary of the key findings arising from the review and their implications for the design of the research.