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This paper discusses the impact of and close interplay between global discourses on children, notions of (a good) childhood at the national and local levels and childhoods as these are lived and experienced in particular social contexts. Two increasingly powerful global images of children are explored: Children as individual subjects with rights to participation as stated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and children as human capital and early childhood investment. I argue that the market‐oriented politics and ‘global images’ of childhood are connected to particular ideological notions of what it means to be a human being, and an increasing individualization, separating children from an intergenerational social order. The discussion is empirically grounded in case studies in Norway and Ethiopia. The paper highlights the contradictions especially with respect to safeguarding local livelihoods and knowledge suggesting limits to the ‘sector based’ approach to children's participation and rights to education. It highlights the need to move the focus from children as objects of investments to a ‘politics of recognition’, in ways that value individual dignity and knowledge as constructed by children and adults within local ‘belonging communities’.

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This article explores the role of children in household livelihoods among the Gedeo ethnic community in Ethiopia. Three themes are discussed — reproductive activities, entrepreneurial work in marketplaces and sociospatial mobility — in the context of recent theoretical debates over children's agency and social competence. With shifts in rural livelihoods, children have developed new agentic and entrepreneurial skills in domestic work, trade and migration. This agency is negotiated in everyday life, but it is also structurally highly circumscribed. Situating children's work within post-rural economic development offers insight into the ways in which regional and global political economy shape their local livelihoods.

As a participant at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Sharon Stephens highlighted her experiences of children's participation at the conference: `Many of the young people at the conference expressed frustration with the official convention negotiations and felt that, while their presence was desired as a sign of the importance conference organizers placed on the participation of children and youth, in fact their views were not really taken seriously.' Her sensitive observations highlight the importance of analysing discourses on `children and participation' in a historical cultural context, and question the current, flourishing interest in those discourses. The aim of this article is to contribute to a discussion on how discourses on `children and participation' are deeply embedded in discursive fields other than children and their rights. Studies of participatory projects in Norway illuminate in particular an interrelatedness between constructions of childhood and constructions of sustainable local communities in Norway in the 1990s.