Executive Summary

Canada is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Engaging children and youth in policy development supports the principles of the Convention’s Articles 12 and 13 related to the rights of children to receive information, express views and have input on decisions that affect them. Canada's Youth Policy (2020) advocates for respecting and valuing young people's opinions.

The purpose of this literature review and compendium of practices is to describe effective, promising and emerging practices that the public service can use to engage children and youth in policy development. The spectrum of beneficial activities described ranges from secondary research on children and youth with no engagement, to informing, consulting, involving, collaborating, and empowering through decision-making with young people. The literature suggests the further along the spectrum towards more meaningful engagement, the greater the benefits for young people and for the responsiveness of policy in meeting current child and youth needs.

The literature review included 50 academic studies and 23 organizational publications (English and French). In brief, the research outlines overarching principles to guide implementation: respect for young people’s voice, balancing power and relationships with adults, supporting feelings of belonging, and making space for young people to contribute on their own terms. The research shows that there are several effective practices that have been proven to engage children and youth in activities related to policy development that are documented in peer-reviewed academic literature. These include using multiple methods so diverse young people can participate (such as focus groups, arts-based activities, and surveys) and implementing iterative cycles so that young people can explore their experiences, develop their ideas and build meaningful recommendations. There are also several promising practices, which have been successful at engaging young people and gathering their voices, and are categorized as promising because they are not as well evaluated or have mixed findings. These include co-creating shared principles, hybrid online-offline methods, youth advisories, and integrating previous research with young people into policy development. Finally, there are many innovative emerging practices that are not evaluated but have been described in the recent literature. Many of these are related to current technology such as digital platforms that have been designed or adapted for engaging young people in sharing their perspectives, designing solutions, analyzing data, and developing prototypes to inform policy. Examples include use of videogames, virtual polls, and data analysis software.

Key considerations for policy makers engaging young people include diversity, consent, safeguarding, compensation, mitigating risks, benefits of virtual and in-person spaces, and using identified methods which have evolved over the past decade to reflect pressures related to social issues, climate change, a global pandemic and changes in technology and culture.

The compendium presents this inventory of practices and tools designed to support policy makers in integrating child and youth voice at various stages of the policy development process, such as identifying issues by using activities that support young people to think about the systems that influence the policy issue, arts-based activities to gather young people’s perspectives and ideas, and participatory sessions to make meaning of the data gathered to inform policy. For issues where it is especially critical to hear the voices of the hard-to-reach, the evidence indicates working with trusted adult allies to young people in those communities allows for deeper conversations and understanding about the policy issues they face.

The continuum of processes and practices together set a high bar of aspirational, gold standards of child and youth engagement to work towards. Using the framework, practices and core principles, particularly, that of respect for the significance and value of direct child and youth voice in policy development, is designed to guide policy makers to choose the scale, type and duration of child and youth engagement appropriate for their budgets, timeframes, and desired results. Advancing toward more comprehensive youth engagement in policy development using the practices and principles identified in this review benefits participating children and youth and drives creating responsive and effective policies.