
by Barry Percy-Smith (Editor)
A Handbook of Children and Young People's Participation brings together key thinkers and practitioners from diverse contexts across the globe to provide an authoritative overview of contemporary theory and practice around children's participation. Promoting the participation of children and young people - in decision-making and policy development, and as active contributors to everyday family and community life - has become a central part of policy and programme initiatives in both majority and minority worlds. This book presents the most useful recent work in children's participation as a resource for academics, students and practitioners in childhood studies, children's rights and welfare, child and family social work, youth and community work, governance, aid and development programmes. The book introduces key concepts and debates, and presents a rich collection of accounts of the diverse ways in which children's participation is understood and enacted around the world, interspersed with reflective commentaries from adults and young people. It concludes with a number of substantial theoretical contributions that aim to take forward our understanding of children's participation. The emphasis throughout the text is on learning from the complexity of children's participation in practice to improve our theoretical understanding, and on using those theoretical insights to challenge practice, with the aim of realising children's rights and citizenship more fully.
Format: Illustrated
Pages: 404
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 14 Aug 2009
ISBN 10: 0415468523
ISBN 13: 9780415468527
`This landmark book reveals how much our understanding of children's right to participate has grown in the twenty years since the launch of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is a basic resource for anyone who believes in children's rights and capacities as citizens.' - Roger A. Hart, City University of New York, USA
The Handbook will be an essential resource for anyone embarking on a child participation initiative as well as for students and scholars in childhood research and children's rights.' - Martin Woodhead, Open University, UK
'The contributors to this ambitious and extremely accessible volume on children's participation are to be congratulated for their ground-breaking work...The Handbook is an essential read for scholars, policy-makers, practitioners and children's rights advocates.' - Jo Boyden, University of Oxford, UK
I found this volume very informative and intellectually stimulating. The phenomena described and the issues debated are indeed familiar. This Handbook is well worth a careful reading, and I recommend it with enthusiasm. -Social Work with Groups