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The different meanings of “participation”

It can be said that there is no uniform understanding of what exactly is meant by youth participation, neither in international comparisons nor at the local level. Instead, different concepts and ideas are used to describe "participation". This diversity of different understandings is exemplified by the Gothenburg case:

From simply having an existence and to some extent being able to interact with the environment, to a rare often formalized state that can only be achieved under certain conditions. (…) In the analysed expert interviews and group discussions participation is understood in different ways: as merely being (the existential level); as altruism

(doing something for someone else); as conditioned by structure and/or individual agency; as power; as influence; as decision-making; as tied to meaningfulness; as subversion/participation in a “parallel society” (withdrawing from the participatory modes offered by conventional society, such as education, employment, etc., seeking recognition through criminality, fundamentalist and violent ideological and religious movements); as cultural production; as leisure time activities; as politics; as consumerism; as activism; as a formal right awarded to citizens of the nation-state (non-citizens are by definition disqualified from many forms/levels of participation) (NRG, p. 18).

Despite this diversity of understandings, participation is often placed in the tension field between the individual and society, and is understood as a result of a complex interaction between them – different interviewees give different emphasis on individual versus societal responsibility. These understandings can be seen as linked to different discourses regarding the relationship between youth and adults, obligations, and power relations (NRG, p. 18). As such, participation is often understood as a pathway towards becoming an effective member of a community. It occurs when a young person encounters others, putting his/her efforts into a shared project, thus identifying themselves with a group for a period of their life. It is lived as cooperation, when you do something with others, sharing projects. Participation also implies a process of “socialization” of other values through the groups (loyalty, honour, respect). Another crucial function of participation is making citizens active, reshaping communities in a context of generational and social proximity. Social activation can be lived as a method of transferring power from traditional authorities to people that are not generally involved in decision-making processes (NRB, p. 19).

At a policy level, fomenting youth participation seems to consist in bringing young people into societal participation (socialization mission), thus contributing to a shift in the existing power relations in the societal decision-making processes with a view on the immediate life spaces of young people in their cities. The extent to which this change in power relations is achieved is, from the point of view of young people, very limited (see chapter 3.2). Nevertheless, it is striking that ““youth participation” as a theme, perspective and a working approach has gained significant prominence during the last two decades, being today an inescapable concept used by people who directly or indirectly conduct work with young people. This is concretized in terms of heightened the awareness amongst the professionals working with young people when it comes to their rights, their voices and perspectives, as well as involving them in decision-making processes which in turn goes along with a diversification of tools and forms of youth participation.

There seems to be a general tendency throughout Europe that a democratic society can only live up to its own claim if it can make it credible to the youth that social participation is open to all social groups, namely including those that do not have a political right to participate due to their age or nationality. At least among the adults surveyed, this explains the mostly positive connotation regarding the concept of participation. Participation, one could generalize, seems to be an important guarantor for a good co-existence of different social

groups and seems to become more and more important for the legitimation of democratic forms of governance (NRG, p.19). At the same time, debates reveal a struggle for real politics and representation – going beyond fulfilling pre-defined roles and following pre-defined agendas (NRF, p. 73).

Some of the groups of young people noted a difference between “genuine” and “fake” participation. In Plovdiv, for example, the formal participatory possibilities offered by the state are generally assessed negatively: “(T)he term ‘formal’ is mostly understood to mean ‘lacking of meaning’, ‘false’, ‘tokenistic’ instead of a more neutral definition, such as ‘organized’, ‘official’ or ‘registered’” (NRP, p. 21). This is due, among other things, to the great distrust that young people nurture for state institutions or their political representatives, whose credibility is damaged by various corruption incidents. The interviewees in Rennes highlight “the preference of decision makers for formal participation and their distrust regarding informal forms. They refer to “good” forms versus “bad” forms of participation"“(NRR, p. 27). In Eskişehir, researchers identify a mutual distrust among young people and adults (experts). Adults share the perception that young people are not sufficiently involved in society and have no interest in participation. They usually describe young people as ‘highly self-confident” but “not interested in social and political issues” or as “individualist” who are “not willing to take responsibility”’ (NRE, p. 19). Nevertheless, the experts in Eskişehir state that young people are participating in "social and cultural activities in Eskişehir relating to entertainment" in various ways: ‘One of the most frequent “complaints” by experts/adults pertaining to young people is that “you need to assign them a task, they never come with a proposition”’ (ibid).

In the case of Eskişehir, this situation relates with the highly charged political situation in Turkey, which inhibited the interviewed actors to explicitly talk or refer to politics, and “most of the families do not want their children to participate in political activities” (NRE, p.20). As a result, a clear demarcation from the political sphere can be identified, while social areas such as cultural activities are secretly being charged with political meanings.

In other cities, political and formalized participation happen within the realm of representative democracy. However, for many young people, the formal policy often represented by party politic plays no role in their everyday life and furthermore often carries a negative burden (NRF, p. 81): “’They are willing to participate, but “they want to do society, not politics" and so they are encouraged in taking part in what is not or does not look like “politics”’(NRB, p. 18).

To many young people, being political and getting involved in policy-making is connected with concrete projects in which they can expand their individual competences. Very often, when young people are positioned as politicised, it is often within individualised forms and regarding particular issues, which relate to them, rather than connected to structures or collective forms of representation/power. There is also an attempt to recognise but destabilise notions of citizenship, yet at the same time position young people as commodities and economic resources (with limited recognition of current precarity), for example in relation to

economic regeneration in Manchester, where the narrative of the culture and knowledge industries driving regeneration is strong (NRM, p. 20).

In summary, it can be said that the different discourses regarding appropriate and inappropriate participation, as well as committed and non-committed young people, are subject to very different expectations. This is summed up in the following quote on Frankfurt, but applicable to the other cities as well:

for the administrative representatives participation should be effective and efficient, for youth organisations it should be self-organised and/or involve engagement with and for others. [Youth] experts do not blame young people for not participating in the right manner. They understand, explain or even justify and focus on reflecting what young people need and how they can be motivated and educated toward participating in what they conceive as real participation. (NRF, p. 85)

This contrasts to varying degrees to ideas on participation – although usually not named as such – by the young people. This feature is illustrated in the next section.

Participation - abstract and scarcely tangible to young people

It is striking that in many cities young people hardly use the term "participation", and show little association with it. This contrasts with the opinion of the experts from the fields of youth policy and youth work, who use the concept with a high degree of self-awareness, albeit with different meanings. For the young people the term "participation" or "youth participation" is often an alien one (see, for example, NRG, NRF, NRR). When asked about activities relevant to them, young people speak more of engagement or commitment than of participation (see NRR, p.31). The idea of "youth participation" derives less from the everyday life of adolescents and more from the conceptual world and the language used by adults or the adult world of the organisations. In Gothenburg, ‘“Youth rarely think about “participation”; “do I participate”, “how do I participate”, and “should I participate more?” – the idea does not emanate from their life worlds. In most cases they are busy with simply being young, with all the challenges that entails, in terms of education, work, social relations, and future plans in general”’ (NRG, p. 75). For many young people, most of their most enjoyable and relevant activities fail to be identified by them as “participation”: “Having fun together is probably the most common activity of young people in the city. This entails hanging out in cafes and in city squares and parks. However, neither the youth experts nor the young people whom we interviewed defined this as ‘participation'” (NRP, p. 20). In Rennes, the following keywords are common in the youth discourse: “cross-sectoral approaches in relationships, co-construction or co-decision and self-training” (NRR, p. 31).

This general assessment applies in particular to young people who are not engaged as volunteers or group leaders in youth associations or the student council. The latter are better equipped to associate with the concept of participation, since they move in the adult world, which defines the terms of and deals with formally shaped structures in organisations and associations. At the same time, both the city-specific analysis as well as the transnational analysis show that the term is neither consistently used nor uniformly defined. Much rather,

“interpretations shift between self-determination, choice, decision-making, social engagement, voluntarism, representation, raising one’s voice, lobbying – or simply being there” (NRF, p.24). For individual groups in Plovdiv the term participation or rather the promise of participation is seen as positive in connection with the idea of “‘being active’ in public life. (…) Being active was understood as doing something for social change, getting involved instead of being just a standby observer” (NRP, p. 48). A different group of actors then differentiates into two types of motivation for social and public commitment: “(…) one that comes from the need of personal satisfaction and the idea of being useful to others, and one that follows an egotistic career and financial ambitions. While some admitted that these are not mutually incompatible, the dominant understanding of participation was of activity in which altruistic motives take the lead” (NRP, p. 49).

In view of this, it is not surprising that “most young people interviewed in the mapping process (i.e. in group discussions in everyday contexts) do not refer to and ascribe meaning to participation in terms of politics and institutionally and pedagogically framed forms of engagement, involvement or co-determination” (NRF, p. 24). It is also not surprising that, in view of this fact, young people have little knowledge of the existing formal vessels of participation in their cities and their importance in the overall youth political structure of the city (NRG, p. 72).

In summary, it can be said that participation is a concept from the adult authorities’ world, which is closely linked to political promises and expectations. Provocatively expressed, one could say that adults are trying to make young people participate in the world the adults have already prestructured for the young people without leaving enough openness for them to define their world and forms of participation themselves. The fact that young people often avoid these offers is then seen as an egocentric attitude of young people or as a lack of ability to adapt to the rules of political negotiation procedures. From the point of view of young people, these offers often appear to be a kind of alibi exercise, since from their point of view the real power relations do not change. If there is little sense and no individual purpose to be gained from the activities offered, the young people prefer to withdraw and seek own possibilities.

What is really relevant to young people and how specifically they involve themselves in different cities through actions is explained in more detail in the following section.