yes / In 2012 Steven Mintz argued that the history of childhood matters, since it has context-specific implications. This paper outlines the historical construction of childhood, in general, and specifically in Ghana, and presents how childhood construction impacts on children’s participation in Ghana. The paper argues that the cultural value underpinning childhood construction in the Ghanaian context - i.e. unidirectional respect from children and young people to adults at all times - has implications for children’s participation, as it limits children and young people’s willingness to participate in decision-making forums. The paper concludes that by such cultural ideology any participatory effort that includes children, young people and adults together may be counterproductive and thus likely to fail.

One of the major contributions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child(UNCRC) to the context of children’s rights was the introduction of participation.In addition to the right to provision and protection, participation gives children theright to express their opinions in all matters affecting them. Furthermore, theyhave to be provided the opportunity to be heard. As part of their continuedcommitment towards children’s rights, Sweden has now decided to incorporatethe UNCRC to its legislation. Based on this context and drawing from literatureabout children's rights and participation, and a study case of youth participationand culture, the project seeks to create a model that promotes and improvechildren’s and young people’s participation an influence. Thus, the project aimsto contribute to the applied research field and inform on practical approaches tochildren’s participation and influence. As a result, the project proposes HejÅsikter! An ecosystem for children’s and young people’s participation, wheredifferent stakeholders benefits from collaborative and coordinated work andultimately achieve children’s acknowledgement and empowerment.

My doctoral research has explored how young children’s participation was put into practice—how it was ‘lived’ and negotiated—in the context of one early learning and childcare setting. The concept of children’s participation is rooted in large part in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which enshrines children’s right to express their views and have those views taken into account. However, young children’s participation rights are often overlooked. The more prominent discourse about young children has been one that focuses on early childhood as a preparatory period of life, in which adults must intervene and shape children’s development. My research has therefore focused on child-adult relationships within the early childhood setting, looking at how young children and early childhood practitioners ‘lived’ children’s participation and negotiated the tensions and challenges that arose for them. To carry out the research, I used an ethnographic methodology to study one fieldwork site in depth. ‘Castle Nursery’ was an early learning and childcare setting in Scotland, where practitioners professed to work in participatory ways with young children. The long-term nature of ethnography allowed me to observe how children’s participation was lived and negotiated at Castle Nursery over an eight-month period of fieldwork. The research found that practitioners challenged adult-led, ‘schoolified’ practices by foregrounding young children’s knowledge and contributions to the setting. Children’s participation was embedded into play-based pedagogy at Castle Nursery, with practitioners organising time and space to allow young children a great deal of influence over their daily experiences. Rather than planning adult-led learning activities, practitioners instead cultivated a rich learning environment for children to explore, through free-flow play. The thesis has also highlighted a variety of tensions and challenges that arose. Even at Castle Nursery, where practitioners were proud of the ways their work challenged conventional norms about young children, there were limits to how far practitioners would take a participatory approach. The thesis has particularly highlighted the importance of reflective practices about the ethical dimensions of early childhood practice. Uncertainty seemed to be an inevitable and enduring feature of living young children’s participation.

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognised children’s human right to participate in decisions that affect them. Yet, twenty-five years after ratification, children’s participation remains frequently problematic in practice. This thesis examines the practice of NGOs that have been implementing children’s participation at the community level for more than ten years in two specific settings: Tamil Nadu (in south India) and Scotland (UK). The thesis is an explorative study; it examines the findings through two case studies (one in each country). Each case study involved observations/informal discussions and semi-structured interviews with children and staff members from the NGOs. Relevant documents were obtained and scrutinised. The analysis of the empirical data uses three concepts: competencies, child-adult relationships and influence to illuminate and analyse the implementation of children’s participation within the two case studies. Firstly, the empirical analysis highlights that children within children’s participation projects acquired knowledge and skills and then applied them in particular situations within the participation projects (personal and social competencies). Nevertheless, the two case studies showed that adults’ crucial role in legitimising children’s competencies can either facilitate or block children’s participation. Secondly, the child-staff/adults’ relationships were not enough to be considered as the hierarchy within the organisation’s social order was needed to be analysed to have ‘successful’ participation projects. Thirdly, Lundy (2007) provides a model for how adults can be more accountable to children and enhance children’s influence over decision-making in their communities, but some missing elements can undermine the extent to which children’s views are appropriately acted upon. Based on a modification of Lundy’s model, this thesis proposes a tripartite collaborative and intergenerational framework involving the relationships between children and adults in power facilitated by staff members. The thesis contributes to debates about children’s participation by arguing that implementing children’s participation requires a relational and contextual focus on collaboration and intergenerational dialogue. The thesis makes recommendations for practitioners and decision-makers on how to deploy Lundy’s modified perspective to implement children’s constructive participation at the local level.

The purpose of this study was to examine children's participation in court proceedings on supervised visitation and to analyse the descriptions of children in court verdicts. Eleven verdicts concerning supervised visitation resolved in 2014 were collected from two district courts in Stockholm County and studied with a qualitative textual analysis. The material was analysed with participation levels influenced by the ladder of participation for children developed by Roger Hart and with the theory of sociology of childhood. Our findings showed that children's opinions were mentioned in eight of the verdicts. In four verdicts the children's will influenced the courts decisions. The children’s will was in none of the verdicts determinant for the outcome. The children's level of participation had no correlation with their age. The children were often described as having universal needs rather than individual needs. The will of the children was in some verdicts invalidated by the court because of their age and their perceived lack of ability to understand what's best for them in the future. Our conclusions are that the court rarely described the children as independent actors or took the children's wishes into account.

Sweden is often seen as a pioneer when it comes to children’s rights. Despite this, there is a lack of children's participation in issues that affects them. The aim of this study is to explore how social workers in the Swedish social services enable children’s participation in assessments and which factors that can affect this. The study has used a qualitative method with semi-structured interviews with six social workers. The interviews have been analyzed by using Shier’s pathways to participation model and Lipsky ́s theory of street level bureaucrats. The result shows that social workers enable children's participation by using different methods and tools, the two most common being BBIC and Signs of Safety. Factors that can affect the work with children’s participation are implementation of different methods into the organisation which have a positive effect and a lack of time due to a high workload which have a negative effect. The conclusion of this study is that the social workers have a lot of methods and tools to enable children’s participation but that factors like lack of time due to a high workload makes it impossible for the social workers to enable children’s participation in the way that they should.

The Convention of the Rights of the Child has become law in Sweden, entailing municipalities to adapt to the pillars of the convention, one of them being children’s right to participate. Due to the Swedish planning process, the convention is overruled by other planning- and building laws, meaning that municipal practitioners are free to adapt the convention on their own terms. This thesis aims to explore through qualitative comparative analysis how children are included in planning processes in an urban, municipal and regional context. By interviewing practitioners from eight municipalities in Skåne, this thesis identifies what enables or challenges practitioners to purposefully initiate and perform urban transformation with children as active participants in decision-making in urban development projects. The results show that evaluation and feedback-loops are important to acknowledge throughout projects, not only as a final subsequential step. Municipal practitioners have to identify strong intentions early on in projects and have to decide upon what role children should have in projects. Children can either have consulting roles for specific projects, or the approach could have a more soft-value focus, highlighting the democratic learning process for children and empowering them to become future community-builders as they grow up. The results also show that networks are a crucial component to working towards more participatory activities and projects with children as active stakeholders. This embraces collaborative planning ideals and strengthens the case of including more stakeholders and agents in planning processes.

The usage of children’s books is a fundamental aspect within a preschool environment. Even though the content in such books are childlike, they are always written by adult authors who appropriates a child-perspective. This sparked an interest in creating a children’s book with the cooperation of a group of children and producing a story from a children’s perspective. The overall objective of the project was to improve children's participation in preschool and develop their understanding of democratic principles through the creation of their own story book. By using art based research as the method, creative workshops were carried out where the children created their own story through conversation and artwork. The collected data were in the form of transcriptions of films recorded during the workshops and the artwork done by the group of children which was analyzed using concepts such as democracy, participation, child-perspective and children’s perspective. The steps which involved the creative workshops together with the group of children were further examined by the usage of Roger Hart’s Ladder of Participation.  The results of the project showed a high level of participation by the group of children due to possibilities provided for them to exercise democratic principles such as voting and decision making as a group while creating a story and all its essential contents from their perspective. In regards to the Ladder of Participation, genuin participation of different levels were observed from the group of children during the course of this project. The 2 highest levels of the ladder; where an activity is initiated and carried out by children, were unable to be reached since in practical sense, preschool aged children need adult assistance. The storybook created involved a fantasytale titled Superkatterna (The Supercats) which consists of cats, dinosaurs and unicorns in their rainbow world, conflict between the cats and dinosaurs and how the unicorns help them to resolve their issues. Regarding the composition of the 1st draft of the storybook, had there been a wider time frame for this project, the children could have had the opportunity to be further involved and their level of participation during this step would have been able to become higher than what it was during the project.

This thesis explores children’s and pedagogues’ participation in project work in a Swedish preschool inspired by the pedagogical philosophy of Reggio Emilia and its associated participatory agenda. The overall aim is to investigate how children are involved in the shaping of project work in everyday interactions. The study examines how children’s participation and involvement in project work, as it unfolds over time, is organized and negotiated in interaction; what children and pedagogues are oriented to and what communicative, embodied, visual, and material resources that are used. The empirical material was collected during a six months long video ethnographic study among four to five years old children. The video recordings and field notes collected during participant observations are analyzed from an ethnomethodological and a socio-cultural perspective. The study sheds light on how both children and pedagogues are active agents in the constitution of project work and the various communicative and material resources that they draw upon when participating in project work. The findings highlight how the pedagogues work to create conditions for children’s participation and how this work is intimately connected to and dependent on children’s agency. Moreover, it is shown that the pedagogues are creating conditions to facilitate children’s participation through various activities that at first glance appear as controlling. Among other things the pedagogues vary how wide ranging content is allowed. When participating in project work the children are treated and act as competent. They relate to tasks as active subjects and participatory agents in that they coordinate various resources to solve problems and to create products. In their interpretations and reinterpretations of a given task, the children take into account as well the pedagogues’ instructions as their own and other children’s interests. / Forskarskolan: Globalisering, literacy och utforskande lärprocesser: Förskolebarns språk, läsande, skrivande och matematiserande

Sibling caretaking, although common across time and cultures, has not been well researched from the carer’s point of view. In Nicaragua, ranked as one of the poorest countries in the Americas, sibling caretaking is common. The country’s historical background and its state of chronic poverty, widespread unemployment, loose family structures, and migration and mobility makes of the old practise of shared management child care a necessity. Households headed by sing¬le mothers constitute a particular Nica¬raguan charact¬eristic. Many children are expected to help in their own families and care for their siblings and other children living in their households. In its broadest sense sibling caretaking is a public health concern, and we conducted this study to widen the understanding of the phenomenon as it is represented in a setting undergoing a rapid social transition. The main objectives were to identify, describe and analyse the life situation of sibling caretakers in poor areas in León, Nicaragua, with focus on how they perceived it themselves. A combined qualitative and quantitative methodological design was used, mainly applying an ethnographic approach. A further ambition was to explore involvement of children in a participatory research process in accordance with the ‘Convention on the Rights of the Child’. The overall emotion expressed among the caretakers was pride, even if their situation often was characterized by stress and coping problems. They perceived their work as important for their families and they appreciated to fend for their siblings. Household work and nurturing of siblings were shaping the future lives of the caretakers and constituted part of their socialization. Even if many of these children achieve essential life skills as caretakers, they are at risk of falling behind as they grow older. Their long-term personal development is likely to be hampered by the obligations they have as caretakers. The carers' awareness of missing out on education was the most problematic issue for them. From a societal point of view, caretaking has negative consequences. The individual child is marginalised with limited access to basic education, contributing to overall low educational levels in Nicaragua. While the structuring conditions leading to sibling caretaking may be difficult to change, awareness of how these can affect children might make way for improvements in terms of access to school education and support from the society. The knowledge gained from this study should be further utilised to plan for interventions that take children’s perspectives into consideration.