The world is facing several daunting challenges. Can children and youths come to rescue us?
Setting aside the so-called trade wars launched by the Trump Administration, climate warming, together with biodiversity loss and air pollution, the so-called Triple Planetary Crisis, is the most existential devastating one.
Yet we tend to forget that democratic systems around the world are under stress and are showing signs of cracking under the pressure of a dangerous cocktail of economic malaise, populism, extreme politics and disinformation.
This diagnosis both applies to both the North and South of the world.
More participatory, bottom-up forms of democracy, including the ones focused on reasoned deliberation among citizens, are seen as a powerful antidote to reinvigorate democracy. Imagine localized forums where citizens gather to not only talk and discuss about their most pressing issues but also come up with new ideas and solutions.
Such processes are spreading around the world often times leveraging ancient traditions embedded in the local social fabric. Interestingly, among these practices, children and young people are stepping up and doing so in a way that can both reinforce democratic ethos and help our planet.
It might be surprising to hear that children and young people could play a big role in this task of resuscitating our democratic systems while trying to solve the most complex issues related to climate change and biodiversity loss. The readers might feel incredulous about it but there are some best practices that are happening and it is worthy pay attention to them.
To better understand what is already happening and the overall potential impact of children and young people’s engagement in trying to solve the toughest issues around climate and biodiversity, I spoke with Katie Reid, a children’s rights, participation, deliberative democracy and climate justice expert based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Reid is currently a Child/Youth Participation Advisor at Youth Climate Justice Program of the University College Cork and she is also an Advisor for the Child Rights International Network, CRIN and also a Youth Participation Advisor. In my conversation with her, I was walked through the core elements of children and young people’ participation in civic life. Let’s first demystify the concept that involving and engaging the new generation is just a nice thing to do.
Reid has been working to ensure that children and young people are taken seriously and in a meaningful way. “The climate crisis is a child rights issue” Reid wrote in a guidebook “Children and Young People’s Participation in Climate Assemblies” she authored and published by the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies (KNOCA). “Our youngest citizens have the right to be involved, and taken seriously, in decisions being made today that will directly affect their lives and the lives of future generations”.
The foundation of children and young people’s right to participation, Reid explained to me, lies with General Comment No. 26, a non-binding but nevertheless paramount guidance issued by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. It is essential as explained online in appositely designed website managed by Terre des Hommes, Children’s Environmental Rights Initiative, to focus on “how children’s rights are impacted by the environmental crisis and what governments must do to uphold these rights to ensure that children live in a clean, healthy and sustainable world”.
Reid, a social anthropologist by background, started getting involved on children and young people’s participation when the Scottish Government enabled the organization of Scotland’s Climate Assembly, an exemplary model of citizens’ deliberation. Run online between November 2020 and March 2021, 106 randomly selected members tried to address the question: How should Scotland change to tackle the climate emergency in an effective and fair way?
The most interesting part is that children and young people were fully involved into this exercise through what should be considered another best practice, the Children’s Parliament.
This experience led Reid to specialize on children and young people’s meaningful and real participation in public policies. Deliberative experiences where children and young people come together to talk, discuss and propose have a huge effect.
The clearest example of powerful impact being created by creating pathways to civic participation for them comes from Ireland. This is the land that is a true trailblazer in citizens’ deliberation practices with the government in Dublin truly playing a pioneering role in involving citizens in tackling some of the thorniest contemporary issues. The latest example was tackling biodiversity loss with a Citizen’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss in 2022.
First it is remarkable that the Irish Government decided to focus on an issue that, while it is strictly linked with climate change, is uniquely complex and somehow overshadowed by the former. What was even more stunning was the fact that, during the autumn of the same year, children and young people from the whole of Ireland had the opportunity to delve into this issue. The Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss, the formal name of the initiative, sets the high marks for meaningful children and young people’s civic engagement. It is really outstanding because children and young people were taken seriously.
“At the base of the decision of organizing a parallel but complementary initiative centered on children and young people, there was the recognition that children cannot be excluded anymore” Reid told me. In the process, in October 2022, 35 children and young people aged 7-17, selected through an inclusive and holistic method started in September, met for two weekends to try to propose solutions to preserve and protect biodiversity.
The whole initiative was facilitated by a multidisciplinary team of experts from Dublin City University (DCU) and University College Cork (UCC). Big efforts were taken to involve children and youths in the design of the entire experience, with some of them playing the role of “Young Advisors”.
For participants, this was also a great learning opportunity, a point that Reid highlighted multiple times in our conversation. “Participants learned a lot in a very interactive and fun way and such a dynamic process of learning enabled them to understand the complexity of the issues at stake”.
A new learning pedagogical curriculum was also created out of the Assembly, the Teaching Resources for Youth-informed Biodiversity Education (TRYBE). Teachers and educators will make a wise decision if they will use it. This makes sense because the most complex transformation humanity must undertake, transitioning to a net zero economy that will also protect nature, requires informed decision making and learning is a key.
Interestingly, Reid told me that these experiences enable the strengthening of intergenerational relationships between adults and the younger ones. “There is a real shift on how children can be recognized and acknowledged for their contributions and many adults were impressed by the level of commitment and quality of deliberation among youngsters”.
As part of the deliberation, a bold Vision was agreed upon: “An Ireland where we are connected to, and care for, the rights of nature (and each other) so that biodiversity is restored and protected and we live and grow up in healthy, clean and fair environments”.
Participants also came up with 6 Key Messages, and 58 Calls-to-Action to the Irish Government under 7 themes, from education, raising awareness to governance to energy transportation to waste and consumption to restoring and rewilding to habitat and species protection to overexploitation. The Irish government took their propositions seriously.
Some of the participants even gave evidence in the Irish parliament and the government officially endorsed most of the recommendations, including the idea of establishing a permanent Children and Young People’s Biodiversity Forum. Importantly, these recommendations were included in Ireland’s National Biodiversity Action Plan. Minister Malcolm Noonan TD, the Minister of State for Nature, Heritage and Electoral Reform attended the final weekend to officially receive the children and young people’s calls to action. He highlighted something that, if implemented and scaled, could revolutionize policy making, truly bringing to life the so-called concept of “whole of society’ approach: “The participative process that they designed is, I believe, replicable across all areas of public policy where the views of children and young people are sought. We should be doing much more of this. To say that they had an impact on public policy making would be an understatement. For me, listening to the voices of children and young people has always been just as important as listening to the adults”.
“Young people can make change, they have made change, and they will continue to make change. They will do it regardless of if, how and when adults implement their rights to participate – they recognize the future as their own, and are beginning to treat them as such,” wrote in a blog Niamh Purcell, young climate activist who participated in the Assembly. I wrapped up my conversation with Reid, asking about how she envisioned children and young people’s meaningful participation in the year 2030.
“I do hope that in five years from now, children and young people will be taken seriously by adults when the most important decisions must be made. For this to happen, we need to invest in education and highlight the importance of human rights in children’s lives”.
Purcell in her blog wrote something that we should never forget: “The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child hands our youth the right, the faith and the ability to defend their own rights, and to fight for their own future. I would argue that any nation that has signed the UNCRC has done so as an act of faith in our youth’s ability to lead. So surely, it’s time that everyone, everywhere, gets behind that faith?”
Comment