Ratificeringen av barnkonventionen i Argentina var en följd av att staten visade ett stort engagemang för att arbeta med att främja mänskliga rättigheter. Detta engagemang berodde till stor del på att Argentina under flera år tidigare hade styrts av en militärdiktatur. Men staten gjorde efter ratificeringen inga större ansträngningar för att tillämpa barnkonventionen i praktiken. Frivilligorganisationer i landet etablerade sig därmed som det organ som tog över det största ansvaret med att arbeta för barns rättigheter när staten inte gjorde det. Tidigare forskning visar att det saknas forskning på hur barnkonventionen tillämpas i praktiken. För att bidra till att fylla denna kunskapslucka har vårt syfte med studien varit att undersöka vilken påverkan frivilligorganisationer i Buenos Aires, Argentina beskriver att de har för efterlevnaden av barnkonventionen, samt hur de arbetar efter den. Genom kvalitativa intervjuer har sex intervjupersoner på olika frivilligorganisationer i Buenos Aires delat med sig av hur de arbetar med barns rättigheter. Den insamlande empirin har sedan analyserats med hjälp av barndomssociologin samt Esping-Andersens teori om välfärdsstatsregimer. Resultatet visar att organisationerna på olika sätt arbetar med barns rättigheter i linje med barnkonventionen, även om inte alla organisationer arbetade medvetet utefter den. Däremot framkommer det att organisationerna själva anser att det är svårt att följa konventionen fullt ut på grund av att de har brist på resurser och för att fattigdomen är så utbredd i landet att de främst behöver tillgodose grundläggande behov som mat och omsorg. Eftersom barn- och familjefrågor inte prioriteras inom landets politik får frivilligorganisationer en viktig roll att säkerställa de rättigheter som staten inte tillgodoser.

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.

This thesis focuses on the problem of learning processes in an organization that has decided to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It is based on an assumption that there is interdependency between learning about the CRC and its implementation. The aim is to understand the conditions for individual learning and group learning in the organization. The empirical material consists of 52 interviews, notes and written material from the UN, the Swedish government, and regional levels. The research design is qualitative and the method used is abduction and retroduction. Sensitizing concepts have also been used. The regional context is a county council which has decided to implement the CRC by educating a "pilot-group", and whose task will be to integrate the CRC in the organization. The theoretical frame is mainly constructivistic; learning is an "inside-out" process. It is the individual who does the learning, but these individuals meet in the pilot-group and create knowledge based on their own experiences. The most significant results point out that learning about the CRC is a prerequisite for implementation. Once the individuals have learned about the CRC and how to understand and interpret its implicantions, they also know what has to be done in the administration in order to speed upp and secure implementation. Other important results show how the individuals act depending on to their position in the organization. The administration directors show passive resistence by not including the question on the agenda. The operations managers show active resistence by not taking the CRC into consideration in their contracts "because then you have to show what you have accomplished".

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Problem background: There has been an extensive amount of research done within the field of learning among children. Research regarding the teaching and the context of which this research is aimed to be performed on, is on the other hand scarcer. Costa Rica is one of the countries that has focused on human rights, and with this background, this thesis intends to study how the principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is communicated to children in Costa Rica. We will preform our study on two types of schools; both private and public. We will also examine the impact the context has on communication for teachers when instructing about children’s rights. Purpose: We aim to study the development communication and contexts of which the principles of the CRC are communicated and taught to school children in Costa Rica.  Method: This thesis contains qualitative research. We have relied upon conversational interviews with a hermeneutical approach. Conclusion: This thesis clearly indicates that choice of communication channel has an impact on the interaction between teachers and pupils. Digitized channels are effective in the sense of speed and quantity of information regarding the CRC. However, the context in which the pupils receive and the teachers teach about the CRC is of great importance. The teachers experience many difficulties when teaching since the context not only builds barriers but also challenges them to find more creative ways of teaching. The material used when communicating the CRC varied depending on the economic status of the school. The children wanted and expected technology and digitalization to be a fundamental part of their education.

This study examines what frames the Swedish Lev Upp till Barnkonventionen campaign use, and whether the frames are in accordance to the frames suggested by Keck and Sikkink in their award-winning book Activists Beyond Borders. The Swedish Lev Upp till Barnkonventionen campaign is the only campaign in Sweden that aims to promote the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into Swedish law. It started in 2009 as a network driven by 7 organizations, UNICEF, BRIS, World Childhood Foundation, Swedish Save the Children (Rädda Barnen), ECPAT, Plan Sverige and SOS-Barnbyar, together with the Swedish Children‟s Ombudsman (Barnombudsman). An ideational analysis of the texts, that the campaign uses to appeal to society and persuade, shows that four frames are frequently used within the campaign. Two of the frames are in accordance with the proposed frames, being "bodily harm to innocent and vulnerable people" and "legal inequality". The other two frames set the problem to be poverty/economic vulnerability or psychological harm. Although, all four frames identified follow the three parts a frame should include according to Keck and Sikkink – a problem, a cause with a short causal chain and a specific type of action to solve the problem. This study has contributed with another case study to the limited amount of cases that study how international norms are framed in national contexts. Furthermore, this study has discovered that Sweden, although is using other frames too, use the frames that Keck and Sikkink have proposed.

A core function of the United Nations over the past six decades has been the promotion and protection of human rights. In pursuit of this goal, the UN General Assembly has adopted numerous human rights treaties covering a vast array of rights. Because it has the highest number of ratifications, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CROC), is often lauded as the most successful of all the human rights treaties. Although the breadth and depth of human rights treaties is impressive, the amount of research into their effectiveness is not. Very little scholarship has been undertaken to evaluate the extent to which human rights treaties are being complied with by countries that have ratified them and whether ratification of a human rights treaty has a positive impact on the human rights situation within a State Party’s jurisdiction. The research that has been undertaken has been largely quantitative and limited to studies of compliance with civil and political rights. This thesis builds on this limited scholarship by qualitatively analysing the ‘compliance’ levels of two States, Australia and the United States, with the norm in Article 29(1) of CROC relating to human rights education (HRE). Although the United States has not ratified CROC, it was selected as one of the case studies for this research in order to enable comparison to be made between HRE in a State that has ratified CROC, and a State that has not, thereby shedding light on whether ratification of a human rights treaty makes a difference.

Tanzania ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1991, but still 32 per cent of the Tanzanian children estimate to be involved in child labour. Why children work, the work they most commonly do, and under the conditions which they work differ regionally. This study aims to find the underlying causes behind child labour among boys in Babati Town, both from the researcher’s - and the children’s own perspective. The study was accomplished through a qualitative case study in Babati Town and the data were gathered through semi-structured interviews, primarily with the child labourers’ themselves to get the right child perspective. The data from the interviews was analyzed according to four chosen theories of underlying causes behind child labor with the purpose to see to what extent the findings of the study correlate to the indicators outlined in each theory. The study found that indicators from each theory correlating with the Babati case with poverty as the major underlying cause behind the labouring. From the child labourer’s perspective was poverty the underlying cause for their labouring. Poverty on its own was though, from the researcher’s perspective, found to be insufficient to explain the prevalence of child labour. The problem of child labour is massive due mainly widespread poverty but also due the social context and its traditions, insufficient funding, school policies and inadequate implementing of important regulations as the Convention on the Rights of the Child.