The participation project - facilitating youth participation in the shadows of project logics

Young people’s participation has gained a strong place on the agenda both within research, policies, social work and institutional contexts. This presentation focusses on youth participation within professionally facilitated frameworks. Youth participation has morphed into having multiple meanings and aims shaped by the structures and discourses in the local arenas and in society at large. While young people’s right to be consulted is focal, other drivers shape how youth participation is conceptualized and practiced. One of the subtler, but nevertheless potent drivers can be named ‘projectory regimes’ (Boltanski & Chapello 2005) or ‘planned engagement’ (Thevenot 2016) and refers to the strong presence of managerial and planning logics. This presentation will look across three practice-based projects that aim to facilitate youth participation in change and decision-making on three different arenas: working with human rights in lower secondary school, developing local democracy in deprived neighborhoods and developing an application for youth out of psychiatric care. Across these three cases it will be explored how planning dynamics like managerial logics, timelines and product orientation affects how, for whom and to what aims these projects facilitate youth participation. Three tendencies are detected and discussed: the formation of 1. and 2. degree participants, the disembedding of the project activities from everyday practices and the focus on adhering to and developing programs and tools. Boltanski, L & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new Spirit of capitalism. VersoThevenot, L. (2008) Engagementsregimer, Roskilde Universitetsforlag