Tensions and dilemmas in participatory youth projects working within institutional frameworks

ABSTRACT

The aim of the article is to explore the tensions and dilemmas that arise when bottom-up projects involving young people are placed within policy- and administratively driven institutions. The tensions and dilemmas are illustrated through three cases. The first case illustrates the colliding interests that can arise when institutions seem unable to create space for ideas from youth projects, while the second shows how bottom-up work is subordinated to policy priorities and high-level management anxieties. The third case illustrates the difficulties that arise when youth projects aiming at doing transformative and educative work collide with formal mechanisms of the legal system. The tensions and dilemmas at play are analysed through the concepts of disciplinary and project logic. The article concludes with a discussion of power relations, ownership, and control connected to youth projects and participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth participation
• project vs disciplinary logics
• marginalized youth
• exclusion
• marginalization

Introduction

In the last few decades increased focus has been placed on young people’s declining political and civic participation (Carlton et al., 2023; Forbrig, 2005; Percy-Smith & Nigel, 2009). This interest especially concerns young people defined as occupying marginalized positions; who often display low levels of inclusion and participation in societal arenas such as education, the labour market and civil society activities (Bečević & Dahlstedt, 2022; OECD, 2022). For this reason, the European Union and its member states are funding programmes and projects aimed at enhancing young people’s active participation in matters affecting their lives (EU Youth Strategy for 2010–2018; Pitti et al., 2023). The concept of youth participation has in this context been instilled with positive connotations, in the sense of being an empowering and democratic right (Määttä & Aaltonen, 2016). However, as Määttä and Aaltonen (2016) argue, the increased interest in youth participation is not only based on young people’s own will to participate, but on societal anxieties around exclusion and low political (e.g. campaigns contributions, social activism) and civic (e.g. volunteering, community associations, non-governmental organizations) participation. Consequently, the interest in youth participation has increased in institutional frameworks such as public administration and non-governmental organizations, meaning that participatory projects focusing on young people’s concerns and interests are often conditioned by the extent to which institutional policy and practice are open to them (Carlton et al., 2023). This in turn can create tensions in relation to priorities and expectations when youth participation is organized as projects embracing partnership and bottom-up perspectives (Määttä & Aaltonen, 2016; Pitti et al., 2023).

Based on experiences gathered from a participatory project where marginalized young people’s perspectives have been the point of departure, the aim of the article is to explore the tensions and dilemmas that can arise when bottom-up projects are placed within institutional frameworks. The tensions and dilemmas are illustrated through three cases. The first illustrates the colliding interests that can arise when institutions seem unable to create space for ideas from participatory projects, while the second case shows how bottom-up work is subordinated to policy priorities and high-level management anxieties. The third case illustrates the difficulties that arise when projects aiming at doing transformative and educative work collide with formal mechanisms of the legal system and the life circumstances of extremely marginalized young people.

The article starts with a brief overview of previous studies on tensions and dilemmas related to youth participatory projects within institutional frameworks. It then discusses the concepts of project and disciplinary logic, which are used as ideal types to discuss and analyse the challenges that exist between different logics in youth work. A brief presentation of the research project and method is followed by an analysis of the three cases. The article concludes with a discussion of power relations, ownership, and control connected to youth projects and participation.

Previous studies

Previous studies point to various tensions and dilemmas coming into existence when youth participatory projects are embedded within institutional frameworks. One is that the incorporation of projects into policy and administratively driven institutions can lead to discrepancies between, on the one hand, organizational policies, priorities, and timetables and, on the other hand, a project-based logic that differs from the institutional logic. One example is when measurable policy outcomes are prioritized in the institutional logic, which can mean that short-term goals are favoured over long-term development cycles (Christens & Dolan, 2011). Limited time and resources are another institutional framework that can lead to youth projects functioning on a shoestring budget, forcing leaders to undertake a wide range of responsibilities beyond programme delivery (Larson & Walker, 2010). Another example is that higher-level organizational directives can reflect different perspectives on youth development; for example, they may prioritize organizational goals based on an underlying requirement for effective programme delivery (Larson & Walker, 2010). Discrepancies between frontline youth leaders and their organizations are thus common, as the front leaders confront challenges regarding how to weigh their actions against competing needs of the organization. Ozer et al. (2013), for example, found a tension between pressures on teachers to regard school priorities and their will of maintaining students’ sense of power in a participatory school improvement project. Research shows that this kind of tension leads front leaders to take actions that protect the young participants from demands and restrictions from above (Larson & Walker, 2010; Ozer et al., 2013; Walker & Larson, 2006), but also to take conflicting perspectives on objectives, priorities, and expectations (Faubert, 2009).

Dilemmas in projects embedded within institutional frameworks can also be related to issues of power, control, and ownership due to young people’s age and position in society. Because of their position as not-yet adults, young people occupy a less powerful status in relation to adults (Kohfeldt et al., 2011). Projects operating within institutional frameworks are therefore at risk of producing only symbolic inclusion in the sense that young people’s participation becomes subject to manipulation, coercion, or placation, rather than their involvement in and influence on decision making being recognized (Arnstein, 1969; Hart, 1992; Tisdall, 2017). Young people’s participation can thus be exploited, with adults not granting them any actual power. The idea of participation then becomes illusory and, at worst, leads to a decrease in the autonomy of the participants (Carlton et al., 2023; Määttä & Aaltonen, 2016). Organizational policies, priorities, and bureaucratic regulations can thus work against young people’s needs, concerns, and room for manoeuvre (Forbrig, 2005), rather than leading to their perspectives being recognized and prioritized (Bečević & Dahlstedt, 2022; Tisdall, 2017; Tofteng & Bladt, 2020). As a result, youth participation does not always translate into youth having a meaningful voice in decision making (Carlton et al., 2023). Tension and dilemmas connected to issues of power, control and ownership are therefore always present in youth participatory projects operating within institutional frameworks.

Further, studies show that youth participatory projects within institutional frameworks are embedded in issues of inequalities in young people’s lives (Bečević & Dahlstedt, 2022; Carlton et al., 2023). Carlton et al. (2023), for example, found that while institutional spaces can offer empowerment, systematic and embedded discrimination also exist based on gender, class and ethnicity. This is especially the case when participation is used to ‘tick boxes’ relating to institutional diversity or empowering marginalized groups. There is thus, as Kallio et al. (2015) argue, a tension between, on the one hand, a predetermined and routine-based institutional logic, and on the other, young people’s lives informed by activity and change. This in turn is connected to tensions between a project and disciplinary logic, which will be discussed in the next section.

The concepts of disciplinary and project logic

As Kallio et al. (2015) argue, there is a tension between institutional framings of participation and young people’s lived experiences, which are often open and ongoing due to the character of young people’s lives as always being in a process of becoming. Projects involving young people therefore often work with an open and dynamic logic. However, when embedded within larger structures such as public administration, universities, and non-governmental organizations, projects are conditioned by the extent to which different institutional levels, policy and practice are open to the multiplicity of young people’s lives. This can create a tension based on profoundly different ideas and opinions of what should be done (activity), where and when it should be done (space and time), and with whom (relations). In this article this tension is conceptualized as disciplinary and project logics (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Jensen et al., 2016).

In a disciplinary logic the activity is based on a plan through which what is done can be predicted. The activities are thus predetermined in relation to when, where and with whom they take place. In relation to this, where things are done is formatted before the activity takes place, e.g. within institutions such as schools and formally organized youth clubs in which certain activities take place at a certain time. Time is then, in the disciplinary logic, predetermined by the planning of when things are done (e.g. during certain hours). Planning is thus focused on repetition, which in turn affects how social relations, e.g. between colleagues in schools or officials in municipalities, are organized. The project logic, on the other hand, is constituted by activity. It is what should be done that decides when, where and with whom something is going to take place, rather than a predetermined plan. It is the activity that formats where things are done and how. The project logic is thus characterized by functions, e.g. learning and young people’s needs and wishes, rather than the routines of institutions. The doings are oriented towards the future, such as in isolated specific tasks, focused on the idea of change rather than a repetition of the same activity and sustaining the status quo. Projects are made to end; hence there is a time spent in the project and a time after the project. Time thus appears as temporality, which affects relations. Relations are not confined to a hierarchical structure; instead, they can be seen as connections and when there are many connections, a network is formed. A project is thus an activity within a network (Castells, 1996; Jensen et al., 2016).

In a disciplinary logic institutional policies and practices exist within predefined territorial boundaries, while youth participation often takes place in a project logic based on heterogeneity and the pluralistic characteristics of young people’s lives. In this sense the disciplinary logic is in direct contrast to participatory projects which are framed in a rather radical way in the sense that ‘we make the road by walking’ (Horton et al., 1990). The activity is then determined by the participants together rather than predetermined. The premises of participatory projects are thus based on that shifts in power relations are possible to attain, which institutions within a disciplinary logic are more likely to be resistant to.

The context, method and analysis

The project that the article is based on, ‘Learning from the Margins’ (Lema.nu), had a strong participative core wanting to learn from young people in marginal positions. The methods used are thus situated within the field of critical action research (Carson, 2009; Freire, 1976; Giroux, 1983; Jungk & Müllert, 1987), and specifically inspired by the different national contexts; in Spain the pedagogical element, in Denmark the utopian element and in Sweden the interactive element of critical action research. Relatedly, the aim was to develop a model for participatory social planning, containing a sustainable and pedagogical framework for working with marginalized youth.

The project involved youth from three countries: Denmark, Sweden and Spain. From Denmark, the participants were boys and girls aged 18–25 years with little or no connection to education and work life, and from Spain the participants were unaccompanied foreign minors, 18–21-year-old boys from Morocco. From Sweden, the project involved boys aged 18–20 years living in a socioeconomically vulnerable neighbourhood. The material and symbolic position of the participants can be described as marginalized. However, they were defined as key participants in the project as they were seen as the real experts on their own lives. For this reason, the project involved national and transnational workshops that aimed at giving important insight into marginalized young people’s perspectives, and by that create an important transformation to knowledge in both research and professional work. The structure of the workshops is in line with project logic and was based on non-hierarchical relations and future-oriented goals to make change in young people’s lives (Tofteng & Bladt, 2020). In addition to the young participants, the project involved professionals from different organizations in the three participating countries, such as housing associations, welfare institutions, and NGOs. The organizations differ in relation to what extent they are driven by and organized according to project or disciplinary logic.

Analysis of data

Because the project aimed at developing a sustainable pedagogical model for professionals and institutions working with marginalized youth, the project had to take into consideration typical features of a disciplinary logic. This means that while the project itself can be placed within a project logic domain, it simultaneously existed within formal institutions placed within a disciplinary logic domain. This in turn created tensions and dilemmas related to the project and its participating young people’s needs and wishes, and the disciplinary logic of the institutions. The focus of the analysis has been on this tension and is based on the documentation from the national and transnational workshops and cross-country evaluative discussions of the start-up, implementation and finishing of the project. The documentation consists of wallpapers (large paper sheets) with writings and drawings from the workshops (functioning as a collective ongoing dynamic report) transferred into protocols, steering group minutes and analyses of concrete situations in each country. The focus has specifically been on distinctive patterns of participation regarding power relations and the potential redistribution of power within the project context as well as broader institutional frameworks. The analytic work has been implemented through a common process within the group of researchers in the project. The illustrations selected are based on situations that in the best way exemplify the tensions when the two project logics meet.

The project has followed the adopted guidelines for research ethics used in the humanities and social science in each country. All the participants were informed about the aim of the project, that their participation is voluntary and that they are guaranteed pseudonymity. They were also informed about the future usage of the material collected in the project. All the participants have given their consent, to take part in the project, written or verbally. We want to emphasize that the focus of the article is on situations that illustrate problems that can arise when two different logics meet. The focus is thus on an organizational level, rather than on the participating persons.

Results

There is an increased motivation within municipalities and institutions in the European Union to encourage and finance projects that focus on youth participation (EU Youth Strategy, 2009; Ord et al., 2022). Youth projects are often, similarly to the lema project, framed around a specific task, connected to specific target groups, and financed over a delimited period to create solutions and change for the group in question. In other words, temporality is a condition for many youth projects. At the same time, the projects often work within or towards a formal institution. In the projects at hand, the successful implementation of the results was dependent on fitting into a formal institutional framework. This in turn was a challenge, which will be illustrated by the following illustrations.

Case 1. Colliding interest – organized youth clubs vs ‘a place to be’

A ‘place to be’, was something that the young participants in Denmark wanted to attain through the Lema-project. This was from their point of view, a leisure club with a holistic approach where they are the primary target group, and where they can get the help they find useful, such as job searching, psychological and social support, and a place to hang out. It was in their vision a place near to where they lived, connected to values of safety, autonomy, and ownership. The idea was developed based on experiences of not being able to participate in the ordinary leisure clubs which are offered by the municipality. Clubs that they to a high extent are the target group of. But these clubs do not, according to the participants, provide what they need and want. Neither did the participants experience any ownership in relation to the offered leisure clubs. On the contrary, they were often thrown out because they demonstrated behaviour that did not fit in. In relation to the existing clubs, the participants thus felt like strangers, and they therefore came up with the idea of ‘a place to be’, in which their ideas matter.

As a result, the participating youth and the project leaders of the Danish team made a mock-up of how ‘a place to be’ could be made possible. The mock-up was presented to the mayor of the city. He liked the idea and gave permission to develop it as an experiment within an ordinary pre-existing leisure club. The idea was that the young people would be an integrated part of developing the ‘place to be’, and would be supervised by professionals working at the club, who would act as facilitators. However, on the day of the opening of the project, the leader of the club got cold feet and ended up closing the project on the day of its opening. The project thus never started. The reason given was that he had doubts that the professionals had the resources and the competencies to work within the premise of the experiment and with the target group at hand. He was also in doubt about the institutional support from the higher-level management, which he felt was not there, and would therefore leave him with the sole responsibility for the experiment. The idea of creating a different type of space based on the participating young people’s ideas within an existing institutional framework thus failed.

The young people’s idea of ‘a place to be’, and the challenges in implementing it, illustrates the power relations when ideas from a project logic are expected to fit, and be integrated into, a system in which activities are taking place in a specific space with a predetermined plan. The participants were listened to, and they even had a say in the planning, but in the end, they had no power to achieve their wishes. The ordinary leisure club was prioritized and thus the disciplinary logic. The Danish case also illustrates the tensions that can arise between higher level management and project leaders, which also occurred in the Swedish case.

Case 2. ‘Cold feet’ and tensions between different levels of management

Bečević and Dahlstedt (2022) argue that youth participation is often talked about in terms of choices and possibilities, while the real-life circumstances of marginalized youth are seldom considered. Lack of basic economic foundation, societal positions, and neighbourhood effects evoke asymmetric dynamics between different categories of young people and make participatory spaces available for some but not for others. In the project at hand, this was taken into consideration since its aim and methods were formulated around the participants’ real-life circumstances. However, tensions still arose due to colliding interests between the project and disciplinary logic. This was especially the case in Sweden where the young participants’ involvement was administered by a municipality dominated by a disciplinary logic. Tensions arose between the frontline leaders of the project and the higher-level management of the municipality, due to different opinions regarding organizational priorities. The dividing line was whether to consider the needs and interests of the youth or stick to policy and regulations. The tension is illustrated by a planned trip to one of the transnational workshops where the participating youth from the three countries were going to meet. The project involved two such workshops, one in Spain and one in Denmark/Sweden, and the trip to Spain was, for the Swedish and Danish youth, a strong motivating factor for joining the project since they were from socioeconomically vulnerable homes, and thus were not otherwise able to travel.

During the project, the workshops were postponed several times due to Covid-19. However, in autumn 2021 there was an easing of restrictions, and the project leaders decided to go ahead with the first transnational workshop in Spain. As the Danish and Swedish teams were planning their travel, the higher-level management in the Swedish city where the project was implemented, were hesitant to give permission, and they decided at the last minute not to let the trip take place. This was motivated by the fact that COVID-19 was still spreading, but there was also a ‘cold feet’ factor involved in the decision, articulated by one of the high-level managers. In the discussion on whether to travel or not, the manager referred to a Swedish case from the 1990s, the so-called ‘crime boy cruise’, which was a much-debated method for the rehabilitation of young criminals. The aim was to give young criminals the possibility to desist from criminal activities through the practice of collaboration and responsibility while sailing. Several of the sailing trips were carried out in the West Indies, and they received huge, negative media attention. The point here is that the higher-level manager feared the same kind of media attention being given to the trip to Spain. This led to ‘cold feet’ for him and the other managers. One unspoken reason was that even if none of the participants in the Swedish project were criminals, they originated from the same kind of neighbourhoods as the young boys who participated in the sailing trips.

The decision of the higher-level managers in the city was a blow to the participating young people who had looked forward to travelling, and to meeting youth from the other countries. It was also a blow to the project leaders, who were not able to influence the decision, and yet they were risking losing the confidence of the participants. Conflicting perspectives thus arose between the project leaders and higher-level officials. The situation was difficult to understand both for the young people and the project leaders, especially because they could draw a direct comparison with the Danish team, who decided to travel. In the Danish case, it was taken into consideration that the participants were marginalized youth from socioeconomically vulnerable neighbourhoods in which trust for municipality officials and politicians was low. This was factored into the decision made to travel, but for the Swedish officials this was subordinated to policy and the fear of negative media attention.

The example illustrates conflicting perspectives within the organization, and a discrepancy between the project leaders and the high-level decision makers, but also how initiatives can result in unanticipated ‘lessons’ (Carlton et al., 2023) when a bottom-up project logic is supposed to work within a disciplinary logic. Project-based initiatives are thus in such contexts always at risk of being cancelled or getting their results adapted to a predetermined logic which is not willing to take chances and go beyond the policy and rules it works within.

Case 3. Young people’s lived experiences: continuity and volatility

As Kallio et al. (2015) argues, there is a tension between institutional framings of participation and young people’s lived experiences, which are based on plurality and a multilayered, dynamic life. Young people’s needs and concerns are thus often considered very different from what institutional structures can accept, understand, or implement. In the project this concerns especially the participants from Spain whose life circumstances differed in one major point from the Swedish and Danish participants. In Spain, the project involved unaccompanied and undocumented 18–21-year-olds from Morocco with no residency. This is a category that has different legal conditions in Spain depending on the individual’s age. When under eighteen they are considered Unaccompanied Foreign Minors’ (UFM) (Law 4/2000), which means that they, in most cases, are placed in residential care under the guardianship of the Spanish state (Child Protection System). However, when unaccompanied and undocumented individuals reach the age of eighteen, they cease to be covered by the guardianship of the government. At this point, they are categorized as Ex – Protected Young Immigrants (EXYI), which is a major turning point in unaccompanied young people’s lives. As they are relatively new in the country, with no family or networks to turn to, and faced with this new situation, they need to find their own solutions for their lives. If their life circumstances could somehow be predicted previously, they are more difficult to predict after this turning point.

The participants in Spain belonged to the category of EXYI, meaning that the unpredictability of their lives affected the possible predictability of the project. This is because the aim of the project and the work of the Spanish team collided with the participants’ life conditions. The focus of the team was to improve socio-educational networks to support the inclusion of the participating youth, but the participants’ actual lives tended to be more complex and fluid than the project methods and design could handle. The design was based on a logic that required the same participant to be in the same place at the same time, over a delimited period. However, this design was difficult to maintain, especially in relation to working with the same youth throughout the whole project. During the project, some of them had to stop participating and instead try to find employment either in the same city or in another. Some of them also had to leave the project to find other associations that provided them with basic security such as accommodation, through which they could obtain regular documentation in Spain. The participating youths were thus always on the move, looking for solutions for their lives. This was challenging for the researchers, social educators and volunteers involved in the project who were forced to be open and to adapt to the participants’ life circumstances (Herrera et al., 2022).

This example from Spain shows the dilemmas of projects which target extremely marginalized groups, especially when the project is expected to work within a specific period and an institutional framework. In Spain, it created a tension between, on the one hand, the design and method which aimed at helping the participants to understand the complexity of their situation and to create knowledge for professionals and, on the other hand, the participants’ life circumstances and their striving to regularize their status in the country.

Discussion

Based on experiences from a participatory transnational project where marginalized young people’s needs and concerns were in focus, the article explores the tensions and dilemmas that can arise when bottom-up projects are placed within, or work towards, institutional frameworks. The point of departure is that projects involving children and young people are usually embedded within institutional structures. This means that when young people are invited to participate, their participation takes place within policy- and administratively driven institutions, which can lead to discrepancies between organizational policies, practices and priorities and a project-based logic that differs from the institutional logic (Christens & Dolan, 2011; Faubert, 2009; Larson & Walker, 2010; Walker & Larson, 2006). In the article we use the concepts of disciplinary and project logic to analyse the tensions and dilemmas that can arise when these profoundly different logics meet, and the tensions and dilemmas are illustrated through three selected cases. The first case illustrates the colliding interests that arise when institutions seem unable to create space for ideas from participatory projects. Professionals within formal institutions can get cold feet and end up closing or not even starting projects because they do not fit into a formalized disciplinary logic. One reason for this is tensions between different institutional levels in relation to priorities (Faubert, 2009; Larson & Walker, 2010; Walker & Larson, 2006), which is illustrated in the second case. The example shows how bottom-up work, where young people’s participation is supposed to make an important contribution to knowledge production, can be subordinated to policy priorities and high-level management anxieties. Besides illustrating discrepancies between project leaders and high-level decision makers, the case also shows that initiatives can result in unanticipated lessons and young people feeling resentment and mistrust towards formal institutions. The third case illustrates the difficulties that arise when projects aiming at doing transformative and educative work collide with formal mechanisms of the legal system and the life circumstances of extremely marginalized young people.

The results point to tensions and dilemmas connected to power relations regarding ownership and control of the outcomes of participatory projects. Societal institutions are eager to involve marginalized youth in participatory processes (Bladt & Percy-Smith, 2021; Jensen et al., 2016; Ord et al., 2022), but when these youths’ preferences and needs are brought forward, these do not always fit into the institutional frameworks or even societal norms. This means that when young, marginalized people engage in and try to deal with societal issues, their solutions might be considered out of step with the political and professional domain. There is then a risk that institutional priorities fail to integrate young people’s needs and concerns, making it difficult for them to understand the solutions offered as relevant for them. This in turn can lead to participation being seen as merely illusory and symbolic, with the aim to legitimate institutional logics by giving voice but not the possibility to negotiate and make sure that the voice will be heeded (Arnstein, 1969), which in turn increases the resentment and mistrust towards conventional participation.

Young people’s feelings of resentment and mistrust towards conventional participation is especially important to watch out for in relation to marginalized young people. This is because they are considerably underrepresented in national and local formal institutions, leading to unequal opportunities for them to speak for themselves (Dahlstedt & Ekholm, 2019). The loss of their voices is important to pinpoint because young people are differently situated in society. As Bečević and Dahlstedt (2022) argue, depending on material and symbolic positioning, young people are provided with different conditions under which to participate. As the results in this article show, institutional spaces can offer participation for some youth, usually with more mainstream ideas, they seem less able to create space for those whose life circumstances and ideas do not fit the mainstream. This means that background matters when it comes to access and who can participate and on what conditions (Bečević & Dahlstedt, 2022).

Conclusion

In summary, the article illustrates three tensions and dilemmas that can arise when the logic of youth projects meets a disciplinary logic. Institutional policies and practices usually exist within a disciplinary logic with predefined territorial boundaries, while young people’s lives take place in spaces of heterogeneity and are always in the process of becoming. Young people’s lives thus force projects involving youth to adapt and to be open, and they are therefore not always compatible with a predetermined, disciplinary logic. This was experienced in the project at hand, where the young people were invited to a participatory process not only as informants, but as regular power holders over the project. The invitation is in line with Arnstein’s (1969) argument that to achieve participation in a democratic sense, participatory projects must be based on partnerships that enable those with less power to affect outcomes, solutions, and change.

The article scratches the surface of the complexity of organizing youth participatory processes within institutional frameworks. Despite the intention of the Lema project to give voice to the participating youth, the project was strongly affected and framed by the involved institutions and organization. The strong and coherent project logic was not sufficient to break ways into the disciplinary logic. The results thus show the importance of being aware of the tensions and dilemmas at play when involving young people in participatory projects. If the project stays subordinated to the disciplinary logic, it risks to back-fire by, as Bečević and Dahlstedt (2022) point out, strengthening the feelings of mistrust towards the conventional routes of participation, and by that failing to include the youth to take part as full members of mainstream society.

Acknowledgments

We thank all the young people who have participated in the project that the article is based on.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The article is based on data from the research project ‘Learning by the margins’ (Lema), funded by Erasmus+, Grant agreement No 2019-1-DK01-KA203-060285.