Make (digital) space for the young: youth-led participation in policymaking

Public dialogue is too often a top-down, one-off affair, where the commissioner (e.g. public agencies; academia) sets the agenda, plans the process, decides who is invited. There is a multiplicity of public engagement arenas, digital or in person, but they tend to be adult-centric, hetero-centric, and ableist, often conceived as discrete participatory events. Whereas adults often feel there are many opportunities for young people to participate, young people consider them inadequate or superficial (Forde et al. 2017). Perry-Hazan (2016) notes the difficulty in creating spaces where young people’ views can be taken ‘seriously’ and incorporated into policymaking (see also Stenvall et al. 2023). The pandemic has generated rapid digitalisation of participatory processes and the rise of participatory platforms such as Consul and Decidim (Aragon et al 2017; Russon-Gilman and Peixoto 2019). Young people are often described as “digital natives” and one could assume they might be more likely to engage in digital initiatives, but the gap in access and digital literacy across groups along class, gender and racial lines remains large. Digital participatory processes, similarly to traditional participatory deliberative spaces, are mostly designed from the perspective of public agencies to respond to their bureaucratic needs in addressing a given policy issue. This paper discusses emerging findings from an ongoing youth-led participatory process on mental health. Mindset Revolution experiments with flexible spaces of participation that foster ongoing dialogue between young people, their community, and state institutions. Rather than seeking to include young people into new structures that are pale imitations of adult-led processes, MR reinvents public dialogue as a bottom-up process combining arts-based and digital spaces designed and led by young people (16-25) in Greater Manchester and building on existing grassroots action. The paper focuses specifically on the digital process designed and run by young people (January-July 2023) to identify problems, propose solutions and engage in a youth-led dialogue with other groups in the region working on improving youth mental health, local mental health services and policymakers. We look at how young people make creative use of the platform Decidim and rethink the boundaries of political participation. The paper reflects on the challenges and potential of a youth-led approach to generate more sustainable and embedded engagement and evaluates how policymakers engage and respond to this process.