A través de la conciencia

The seven clusters can be understood in relation with the kind of activities that young people develop in their urban contexts. Common to all clusters is the importance of developing activities together with others and not in isolation. The individual meaningfulness of the lived activity combined with feelings of belonging seems to be a supporting basis for the very different engagements. Especially in the self-initiated or self-organized activities, the experiences of collective efficacy as well as self-efficacy seems to be very important to the young people.

If we compare the seven clusters we find a continuum from traditionally political engagement (cluster I, II); to autonomous forms of political activities (III, IV); to social engagements and cultural activities (V, VI, VII). In the last three clusters, we find plenty of young people who often distance themselves from traditional forms of policy. They want to be engaged but not in politics. Another important differentiation concerns adult-led activities versus youth-led activities. Typical for the clusters I and VII is that the participatory activities are dominantly adult-led. In all other clusters we find youth-led activities as well as adult-led activities. More important for young people is to which extend decision-making, power and influence are distributed independently of status and age.

Within the different clusters, one can distinguish between activities that are oriented towards the transformation and shaping of smaller and larger worlds (such as clusters I through IV) and activities which are more strongly centred around the own person (e.g. cluster VI). So the outreach of the activities differ inbetween the different participatory activities. One could say that the reference to the world and the self, or the relationship between the world and the self, is handled in different ways in different groups.

In addition to the central objectives of the participatory activity, the internal relations between the individual and the others, between the individual and the collective with its respective organisational form, as well as the size and permanence of these collectives or movements and organisations, distinguish the seven clusters between each other.

Also one can distinguish between more or less institutionalized forms. Cluster I, II and VII can be distinguished from the others in that they are institutionalized forms of participation that are anchored in the political system (see further below). Given structures, such as youth parliaments, parties, etc., in which young people join for a certain period of time, establish a fundamentally different relationship between the single person and the organisation, than less institutionalized forms of activities. Finally, there is a distinction between participating within a given structure (youth councils, youth parties, etc.) and participating by collectively creating the structures that frame the joint activity.

Another distinction concerns whether the orientation of activity is made within a collective or within a loose network-like association. The cases show that for example autonomous collectives require more liability from their members than network-like associations like the Sustainable Food Youth Network.

Finally, the temporal dimension must be taken into consideration. From the individual perspective, it makes a difference, if one does invest virtually all of one's lifetime into a project over a certain period of time or if one does while constantly, merely selectively participate in an action, a movement.

It is striking that, in the discourse of youth policy, only two clusters of participatory activities are in the focus, namely cluster I "Representation of interests as right and obligation" as well as cluster VII "Pedagogically supervised leisure infrastructure for young people". Youth policy programs targeted at youth participation remain within their own system boundaries, in which the idea of participation and partaking is reduced to the role of the competent shall

realize their rights and duties within the framework of democratically managed processes. Other clusters show how young people tend to co-create society in the context of self- organized activities (cluster III, IV, V, VI), outside the politically narrowly defined framework of participation. As shown by cluster I, participation in formal settings tends to be based on this and usually negotiated in lengthy opinion-forming processes – often organized according to complicated rules. The young people involved do not necessarily receive more decision-making power and often notice that while they are able to participate in the decision- making process, they can rarely co-decide in the decision-making process, in particular when the decisions also affect the adults. On the contrary, the organized procedures in student and youth parliaments often lead to the fact that the young people feel that adults do not listen to them or do not take them seriously. From the perspective of many experts, this discrepancy between the possibility of participation and the active use of this possibility is combined with a lack of competences on the part of the young people. For this reason, schools, but also youth work, are increasingly obliged organise their activities within a logic of civic engagement. Especially youth work tends to fall into an intermediate position here, because its task should ultimately be to mediate between the interests of young people as well as youth policy expectations and the active citizens in the national and European context.

If participation is reduced only to engagements in traditional forms of democratic processes, one can conclude that there are intentional or unintentional conceptions of 'right' and 'wrong' participation behind.

Participation and partaking - one could provocatively phrase - is only granted if the young people adhere to the externally set procedures. From this perspective, a need arises to train young people for their "participation", as the following statement from an expert from Rennes illustrates: “the need to train young people to participate and to support the development of their initiatives, but the ways to attain these goals can be quite different (with professional support or with peer support)” (NRR, p. 27). This view is also shared by experts from Zurich: “In any case, (…) youth and young adults must first acquire certain skills before they are able to independently realize projects. This includes learning to be reliable, so as to handle responsibility, and acquiring the ability to organize and communicate in order to reach agreements with others, both internally and externally” (NRZ, p. 19). Various channels are used and activated for this, to ensure that youth-workers introduce children and young people to institutional offers, "docking" children and young people to them (NRF, p. 23). Finally, this type of empowerment requires working on personal prerequisites (school performance, competencies, etc.) and the participation offers must be tailored in a way that suits the various target groups, the school system and the family background. Thus, the school, which plays a central role in many studied urban contexts (in Bologna, Frankfurt and Zurich), is addressed as a further important mediating instance of the integration into the citizen role. Depending on the local context, the division of roles between school and youth work is different. This indicates that, within the political agenda, youth work and school have assumed a task delegated by youth policy, in that they have taken the role of the mediator between the political expectations and the interests of the young people: “making young people

participate” (NRF, p. 23). This role of youth work, as critically mentioned in the Manchester report, is difficult to balance.

In order to fulfil their role in this intermediate position, more and more projects with a participatory character are being offered across the eight cities. In other words, youth participation in the context of youth work is reduced to the implementation of projects, such as for example in Zurich: “These projects are based on the idea that in the framework of not particularly complex activities, young people determine or negotiate amongst themselves the focus, goals and organisational forms. The framework itself must be provided by adults” (NRZ, p. 18). Even if youth work sets the framework, it still retains its function of representing and advocating for young people, coaching them or mediating between adults and young people:

This generally involves the assumption that young people have to be motivated to engage in such projects. According to this concept, though this may be an oversimplification, appropriate situations have to be created in order for young people to participate in them. Other experts are critical of this position, as they are of the opinion that participation lies precisely in youth’s attempt to organize and take action in relation to the issues of interest to them. (NRZ, p. 18)

The Manchester report, in particular, gets to the heart of the ambivalence, which results from the fact that discourses regarding youth participation are omnipresent on the one hand, yet, on the other hand, exhibit "the limits of tokenistic practice" addressed by experts in youth work. “Several experts sought to either widen or trouble conventional definitions of politics and participation” (NRM, p. 19).

This also addresses the credibility of participatory offers, such as those detailed in clusters I and VII. However, power division in the sense of empowerment against other groups in society hardly seems to be a problem in youth work these days. Conversely, when young people independently set their own themes, choose the forms of activity and challenge the ruling powers, the activities are rarely interpreted as expressing claims of participation and co-creation. How exactly these other clusters of participatory activities can truly be incorporated into formalized political negotiation processes is a question that needs further exploration.