Co-Creation and Enhanced Youth Participation in Local Decision Making: the Impact on Public Sector

The reverted demographic pyramid makes youth a decreasing percentage of our increasingly aging populations leaving groups of youth with less power and chances to influence the future of public policies and services through the established channels of participation. There is a potential risk of losing the interests of broader, including less heard, youth groups in institutionalized democratic decision-making and implementation. Research evidences that we need to broaden knowledge and accountability towards these groups by including them more extensively through distinctive participatory and deliberative formats in co-creation of public value to secure their trust and meaningful policy impact. One major way to improve trust in the public sector is by enhancing the abilities of professionals, managers, politicians and NGOs to co-create public and individual values with groups of youth for better services and solutions instead of acting and taking decisions on behalf of them. The research on weather and how co-creative experiments with citizens result in learning organisations and impact political governance and decision-making practices is still very limited. Theoretically, this paper departs from a regenerative governance perspective. It contributes with synthesizing previous research on the possible political impact of co-creation experiments on the institutionalized local governance practices and governance renewal. For example, the impact on the youth council operations in the representation of young people in political decision making, or broader local decision making processes. We look into whether the collaborations with schools, NGOs or other democracy educators change due to these piloting experiments. Empirically, it contributes from a comparative perspective to understanding the local government's true interest and capacity for a regenerative shift towards enhanced and diversified democratic participation formats in collaboration with broader actors. Based on data from interviews and self-assessments by municipal representatives, interviews with youth and co-creation organisers, document studies, and cross-sectoral learning dialogues between researchers, public sector and NGO representatives conducted in three countries - Sweden, Finland, Estonia– the paper illustrates early results from a ReCoCreaYOUTH project on their impact and thus a potential for municipal readiness for implementing the principles of diversified democracy in its local policies and decision-making practices. The paper addresses the impact of process design, drivers/entrepreneurs and contexts in achieving any such impact.