The core principle for meaningful and effective youth political participation is “nothing about us without us.”

Any strategies to enhance meaningful and effective youth political participation should be grounded in a rights-based approach and avoid tokenistic activities.

Exemplary engagement with youth to foster meaningful and effective youth participation is:

Genuine: Ensure that you are engaging with young people for the right reasons and that you are approached as partners focusing on an adherence to the values and contributions of young people. This requires recognizing young peoples’ right to participate and valuing the contributions of young people.

Respectful and rights-based: Applying a rights–based approach, which recognizes young people as agents of change and strengthens avenues for youth participation in governance processes. Youth should be approached as active agents who have the right to participate and be heard. Engagement should enable young people’s ownership and leadership in governance processes 

Transparent: This means being clear about the purpose of youth engagement, whether youth-led or when organizations collaborate with youth on processes. 

Accountable: In order for participation not to be a one-off event, mechanisms need to be in place to ensure follow-up, implementation of youth decisions, and accountability to youth constituencies. This requires the development of standards of practice and accountability for youth engagement/development work, including responsibility for reporting back to youth and a framework for monitoring and evaluation as appropriate. It also requires that young people take an active role in monitoring and accountability by establishing channels whereby youth participation can have a visible impact on outcomes. 

Youth friendly, relevant and purposeful: Activities to enhance youth political participation should be as youth-driven as possible. Young people themselves can decide on their priorities, methods, and tactics. The environment and working methods can be adapted to youth capacities and needs – meeting youth where they’re at. Depending on the target age group and context, activities might focus on, among other options: informal, results-oriented projects; low access barriers; easy language; being issue-driven; being competitive with a game element; or technology if educated youth are targeted. It means young people take on valued roles, addressing issues that are relevant to them, and influencing real outcomes. To be relevant, they can link to specific concerns of youth such as unemployment, the environment or HIV and AIDS. 

Inclusive: Ensuring all young people are able to participate, regardless of age, background, religion, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, geography, and mental health. This requires an acceptance and embracing of diversity, and efforts to build upon young people’s diversity and experiences. Appropriate methods can be applied to give marginalized groups of youth equal chances to participate. This also requires being sensitive to gender dynamics and power relationships. Being inclusive requires the removal of barriers, including economic barriers, to enable youth engagement. 

Flexible and open to innovation: Commitment of youth and adults working with youth to be open to new ideas and have a willingness to take risks and challenge existing established processes and structures. 

Capacity-developing: Strengthen youth agency by supporting capacity development for young people, youth organizations, networks, and movements, to enhance mutual responsiveness, trust, and collaboration. 

Sustainable: Sustainability of financial resources for best-practice youth engagement initiatives can help to ensure these are not limited or one-off events or processes. Apart from financial sustainability, youth engagement should be supported by older adults who are the decision-makers and who value and prioritize youth. Intergenerational collaboration reduces the risk of increasing youth voice without establishing a receptive environment. Youth may need to be continually recruited for engagement processes, since they out-grow their membership of the “youth” category quickly. Successful youth engagement leads to decision makers seeking youth involvement and leadership in addressing challenges and designing solutions. 

Voluntary and safe: The safety of all persons in any process, program or organization is paramount. Further, if engaging with young people under the age of majority (i.e. 18 years old), then the engagement would need to comply with legislation specific to working with children. This might involve an organization working with minors to have codes of ethics and standards of practice for working with children, and/or complying with ‘Working With Children’ legislation, if it exists, and putting other measures in place to ensure it is a child-safe environment. Above all, the principles of “In the Best Interest of the Child” and “Do No Harm” should govern engagement by adults with minors. 

(The above is adapted from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Enhancing Youth Political Participation through the Electoral Cycle (2013), and from Restless Development and PLAN International UK, “Principles Guiding for Decision Makers” (2018), http://restlessdevelopment.org/file/guiding-principles-pdf.) 

These guiding principles are not exhaustive; they are a starting point, and can be strengthened, expanded and applied to your own experiences of engaging with youth. 

See Annex: Guiding Principles for Supporting Young People as Critical Agents of Change in the 2030 Agenda (https://www.youth4peace.info/GuidingPrinciples/Youth2030) 

See Annex: Guiding Principles on Young People’s Participation in Peacebuilding (developed by the UN Inter-Agency Network on Youth Development’s (IANYD) Subgroup on Youth Participation in Peacebuilding, co-chaired by the United Nations Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) and Search for Common Ground) 

https://www.sfcg.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/SFCG-Guiding-Principles-Inforgraphic.pdf