Integrating Children and Youth Participation into Resilience Planning

Abstract

Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 places obligations on States to provide opportunities for children to express their opinions and to have these opinions be taken seriously in matters that affect their lives. While many studies from around the world have shown that children and youth can meaningfully participate to inform a wide range of issues, wide-scale implementation of children’s participation and thus the realization of children’s rights, is still not widely achieved. In the context of planning for urban resilience, three cities in three diverse nations approached integration of children and youth into resilience planning, with varying success. While each city was able to support children’s voicing of perspectives facilitators also struggled with how to authentically integrate youth voices into a new realm of planning—for urban resilience. This article thus shares the approaches and objectives from each city and reflects on what can be learned from these experiences when trying to integrate children and youth opinions and perspectives into community planning, particularly when guided by international frameworks or agendas. While each city has some success in realizing children’s rights to participate, to a certain extent, lack of municipal frameworks for participation and lack of knowledge about and support for children’s participation among municipal leaders inhibited the realization of children’s participation.

Participation as a right to the city: Iranian children’s perspectives about their inclusion in urban decision‐making

“…In responding to these challenges, many child studies nevertheless confirm the capacity and capability of young citizens to accurately perceive urban spaces and their competency in having a voice contributing to place-making (Carroll et al, 2019;Cele & Van der Burgt, 2015;Derr et al, 2018;Hanssen, 2019;Reiersølmoen et al, 2017). Some scholars, however, emphasise the process as a joint collaboration between children and other influential actors.…”

On the landscape of youth participation in science policy

“…As a result, there has been a notable increase in youth participation in public policy in recent years. A study on resilience-oriented urban planning in Mexico City, Boulder (US), and Thessaloniki (Greece) showed that the youth can significantly contribute to urban planning by identifying ways in which infrastructures can be built to support vulnerable social groups such as the homeless and themselves [18]. A study of the Growing Up in Cities (GUIC) program of UNESCO and the Child Friendly Cities Initiatives (CFCI) of UNICEF also made similar observations in Denver (USA) [19].…”