Most, if not all, practitioners in the field of child participation are aware of the ‘Lundy model’ of child participation, which lays out the components of meaningful child participation. We sat down with the author of the model, Professor Laura Lundy, to discuss child participation and why tokenism is better than no participation at all.

Moving child participation from theory to practice 

In the world of child rights research, few people have a concept named after them, but Professor of Law Laura Lundy is one of them. Her 2007 article, ‘Voice is not enough’, laid out a model for meaningful child participation that has since become a staple in both research and practice, and has been adopted by organizations such as the European Commission, World Health Organization, and UNICEF.  

While one of the leading thinkers around participation today, Professor Lundy admits that she was herself initially doubting its importance, like many adults not yet exposed to direct collaboration with children.   

“I listened, but I was not convinced”, she says. It was only when she saw the data from children, collected as part of a research project to support the establishment of Northern Ireland’s Children’s Commissioner, that she understood how important participation is for children.  

“It was clear that in every dimension of their lives, children just did not feel listened to.” 

At the same time, it was clear that adults did not agree with the children’s assessment of not being heard in their daily lives. It was exactly this disconnect between adults’ conviction and children’s experience that led Lundy to develop the model, a practical framework for understanding what it takes for participation to make a difference. The ‘Lundy model’ of participation outlines four interlinked concepts that are all key to making child participation meaningful and, most importantly, effective: not only must children have access to safe and inclusive spaces for participation (space) and information and support to facilitate their participation (voice), there also has to be an audience with the responsibility to listen (audience), and a readiness from adults to act upon those views where appropriate (influence). From a child-friendly governance point of view, the Lundy model strengthened the emphasis on the second part of article 12.1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child – that children’s views are given due weight. 

While there is a growing commitment to listening to children, Lundy is concerned that children still are not given an effective voice in decisions impacting their lives, as prescribed by article 12. That is why, together with the Irish government, she has called for the concept of ‘participation with purpose’ – meaning that children are given a genuine opportunity to influence outcomes. Professor Lundy and the Irish government have developed a set of helpful checklists to support practitioners working with children in making this commitment a reality. 

Committing to continuous learning 

In her own work, Professor Lundy is very engaged with the concepts she writes about.  

 “I am a researcher and I also do child participation. So, I get the dilemmas”, she says, referring to some of the common challenges practitioners face in their work. She uses the model in her research practice, a concept coined as ‘child rights-based research’, that engages children throughout the process, from research design to interpreting the findings. 

Professor Lundy uncovers new challenges through her own work with children every day. 

Firstly, she calls for recognition that not all children want to communicate in the same way. Secondly, we also need to make sure that the right people are in the room – those with the power to act. Furthermore, she stresses the importance of feedback.  

“To me, feedback is the critical juncture of transparency and accountability, but we are often very weak at this stage”, she says.  

Adult decision-makers should make a commitment to provide feedback at the start of any participatory process and follow through with it. Sometimes children’s proposals cannot be implemented, and it is important they know why. Lundy has proposed a model of ’Four Fs’ for effective feedback: full, (child-)friendly, fast, and tied to a longer-term follow-up process. 

Finally, Lundy calls for attention to questions of inclusion and representation, topics that her own recent research has focused on.  

“The biggest challenge is getting the children who need to be in the room, in the room”, she says. “We should always ask ourselves ‘Who is this for and are they here?’, and  then work with those children”.  

Yet, at the same time, no space is fully representative of the diversity that children represent – and that is something we must accept, while striving to make participatory processes more inclusive and diverse, she says. Lundy herself lately grappled with this question in the context of being involved in establishing Northern Ireland’s first Youth Assembly. In the end, the decision was to open it up to all children to remove any bottlenecks to participation – an approach different from the typical set-up modeled on adult representative democracies. 

 Perfect is the enemy of good 

 Lundy calls for a radical rethink in the way we approach child participation. In an article from 2018, she challenges the widely held notion that not doing participation at all is better than tokenistic forms of participation. We would not deny a child access to education even if it fails to meet all the quality standards we aspire to, she says – so why are we so ready to deny children the right to participate, when we cannot tick all the boxes? 

Participation should never cause harm to children, but beyond that, Professor Lundy calls for a mindset based on continuous learning and progress rather than being perfect from the get-go. As long as participation does not put children at risk and there is a genuine willingness to listen to what they have to say, the most important thing is to start somewhere.   

“Just because you can’t do it as well as you would like to, does not mean you shouldn’t do it at all”, she says. 

 Recent years have provided a fertile ground for learning from failure, which is a central part of participatory practice. The world has gone through a whirlwind of emergencies in the past couple of years, including a global pandemic. Professor Lundy’s team at the Centre for Children’s Rights in Queen’s was leading a global effort to consult children soon after the onset of the pandemic, but generally she sees the global emergency as a missed opportunity for working with children on defining the response. Had we engaged with children, “we would have realised much earlier the importance of keeping schools open”, she says.  

However, we can use these observations as a point of departure for future emergencies. The team’s  COVID-19 survey tool is now being revised, including with children,  to be deployed in Ukraine in collaboration with Terre des Hommes to understand how children live through conflict.  

Professor Lundy is also pushing the boundaries of child participation by bringing it to new environments and audiences that are not attuned to the concept – or in her words, “meeting people where they are”. One of her latest appearances was talking about participation with the staff of a toy manufacturing company. Other work has involved international sports coaches and charitable foundations. 

Often pushing participation forward is more about changing attitudes and mindsets rather than developing new toolkits. It is about “making adults understand participation is not a gift, but something that they have to do”, Lundy says. The road to meaningful participation is sometimes longer than we would want it to be, but it gets shorter with every step.