A person both supported and actively involved: what does this mean?
[Translation : EPALE France]
Enabling and supporting the active participation of all young people
Article 2: a person both supported and actively involved: what does this mean?
As mentioned in the previous blog post, the European priorities of the Erasmus programme state that “Europe must rely on the vision and active participation of all young people in order to build a better future that is greener, more inclusive, and digitalised”. Furthermore, in the framework of the European Year of Youth, one of the four priorities is “to encourage all young people, especially those with the fewest opportunities, to become active and engaged citizens and agents of change”.
While there is little debate over these commendable intentions, their transformation into public policies for inclusion is more open to question. Beyond these consensual and imprecise intentions, the most pressing issue is their implementation among stakeholders and local authorities. In this article, we aim to clarify what these intentions for active participation imply, as well as the imprecisions and paradoxes they reveal. We also want to illustrate the way in which these intentions can be put into operation in support practices, regardless of those concerned.
Active participation and mistrust
While the question of young people's active participation is raised, a broader question about support services in which people are actively involved (as stakeholders and not subject only to the judgement of an expert) is now widely expressed. This is likely due to widespread suspicion of any form of expertise. France Stratégie devoted an edifying report in 2018 to “Expertise and democracy: dealing with mistrust”. This mistrust was amplified during the Covid period, when vaccination issues provoked a lively debate in society on the role of expertise, its foundations and the freedom of choice of individuals. It is also likely that public policies, while they have gradually modified the discourse on the role of individuals (see the title of the law: freedom to choose one's professional future), the reality of these systems, with a few exceptions, shows a persistence in taking a vertical approach which is more or less prescriptive, where the wishes of individuals (their priorities) and the intentions of public policies in terms of economic adjustment (filling sectors in short supply) are sometimes violently opposed. As a young colleague working in support services mentioned, the more complicated the person's situation is, the less room for choice they have. This restricted freedom of choice does little to help a person become actively involved. In March 2022, the newspaper Le Monde published stories from young people confirming this concern and mistrust: “I am afraid for my future and the future of the planet”. One interviewee put it aptly: “How many times have I heard 'You're young, you'll get over it'? I am 26 years old, and I still have hope that the vision of a more united and environmentally friendly world that I had when I was 16 will become a reality. I think people often patronise youth...”. A never-ending debate?
An actively involved person, co-construction: what does this mean?
These notions are anchored in the perception of people as capable (according to Paul Ricoeur's formula) and able to make decisions on matters that concern them. This contrasts with the notion of a service established on the basis of expertise, founded in an approach of diagnosis/prescription in which the person is informed and even asked to give their opinion. The medical analogy is not anecdotal. The world of health care is an environment in which patients have, for several decades, begun to organise themselves so that their experiential knowledge is taken into account in the management of their illness. All over the world, we see initiatives developing in this direction: collectives, hospitals by patients, patient-experts, intervention in the authorities, etc.
However, this proliferation can mask important differences that need to be clarified. We can distinguish several registers which are often confused and do not receive the same level of contribution from the people supported.
- The first register involves obtaining the person's opinion on a suggestion made to them (for example, stating a priority among several possible choices): they are given the opportunity to express an opinion which may or may not be taken into account.
- The second register concerns the active participation of the person in the system proposed to them: active participation in activities simply indicates mobilisation in what is proposed. In this respect, it does not mean that the person makes a unique contribution. This will depend on the nature of the activity shared and proposed.
- The third, which we believe to be the most fruitful, involves the person's contribution to the development of the service, for example by putting forward hypotheses on the modalities of the service: this involves making proposals. We see this practice developing in many places in the form of social innovation laboratories, again more or less contributory.
These three levels are often confused. It is also clear that the commitment of people to a scheme in which they are actively involved takes on a different level of intensity. They can get especially involved because they feel that they are doing something, that they are taking part, that they are transforming ideas into action, but also and above all because they are given credit for what they have done.
The ambiguities and paradoxes of public policy
These cooperative practices are obviously not new and all stakeholders in Popular Education have been using them on a daily basis with a variety of audiences for decades. Public participation has also been regulated by the legislator in a number of areas of intervention (e.g. accommodation). What is of concern is rather that it remains difficult for these practices to really influence the construction of public policy systems, even though their relevance is now widely documented.
This ambiguity is nothing new, but it is now more easily visible. In France, the terms of reference for part 2 of the call for projects around “Mobilising Invisible Populations” state an intention: “...to promote a different approach, one that starts with people, the difficulties they encounter and the projects they develop, rather than with administrative systems and approaches.”
While this statement is one to be welcomed, in reality, prescriptive approaches and multiple diagnoses highlighting people's difficulties rather than their talents are alive and well. Financial earmarking, categorisation of the public, an insistence on influencing people's behaviour with regard to predefined socio-economic impact effects (the famous growth or tension sectors) are still the dominant rule. Generally speaking, the discourse on freedom of choice and respect for free will is very selective. It applies more to people who have mastered the system. People without experience of these uses are in a position of restricted, pre-determined choices. In short, it is a kind of amplifier of non-use of the law, which raises questions at a time of widespread mistrust.
Illustrations necessary
Moreover, this consensus on general principles (individual stakeholder, a co-construction approach) does not always translate into identifiable professional action. Perhaps it is also because this approach suffers from this very level of generality and is not frequently illustrated. However, there can be no co-construction without concrete observables if we want these principles to be widely disseminated and appropriated. Let's take two examples that we will explore in a future blog post on Epale.
Professional writing (e.g. the summary document in the context of the skills assessment). France has a long tradition of professional writing about people, with a variety of purposes and audiences. However, ambiguities remain and illustrate the issue of active involvement. Does the professional give their opinion on the person and the strategy to be followed? If the answer is yes, then the writing takes the form of verbs of injunction or even insistent advice: “You should...” is the very type of verb that makes a recommendation. If we consider that support is a process of co-construction where the person's point of view is central, then the wording will be very different in the writing and will express this cooperation “We have agreed...” will be more frequently found.
Reading a wide range of professional writing highlight an ambiguity in approaches, where the person does not always have the opportunity to contribute. You can ask their opinion, of course, but the level of involvement is not the same. Agreeing or disagreeing with what is written is not the same as contributing to the key elements of writing. To come back to the medical analogy, complying with the expert's prescription and contributing to the reflection on the care process to be initiated are not the same thing.
These issues can also be found in the many attempts to jointly develop social innovation laboratories alongside young people. But public participation also requires methods adapted to young people's needs, that are quick and not overly formal. We can mention here the Twitch-television project Lab'On-Id run by the Regional Association of Mission Locale centres of Provence Alpes Côte-d'Azur, a laboratory for the expression of young people mobilizing different systems and media: oral communication (round tables, discussion, etc.), video (testimonies), radio, social networks, TV shows, etc.
In this respect, although there are many initiatives throughout Europe, they can only develop if this perspective is taken into account and if the public concerned feels that it can influence the decisions that concern them. The issue of citizen participation is not youth-specific, of course. We can see the difficulty in progressing from a simple debate and listening to points of view to a transformation of public policies.
These few illustrations highlight possible confusions. Facilitating participation is not only about active and dynamic pedagogies in which people are stimulated. It means designing a demanding form of support engineering that seeks to develop arrangements based on a few principles:
- Valuing the experiential knowledge of each individual: this implies thinking of support not only as relational, as a space for shared reflection on future scenarios, but also as a place for creating new experiences and opportunities for encounters.
- Building on the public's preferred systems: vertical models based on soft and hard prescriptions can no longer be imposed.
- To clarify principles of approach in systems that tend to categorise and standardise or even quantify flows of people.
Providing support means listening to each person in their unique context and facilitating their mobilisation towards what speaks to them in their situation. And this cannot be reduced to a focus on curves and flows that reduce us all to a data set.
André Chauvet
https://www.strategie.gouv.fr/publications/expertise-democratie-faire-defiance
https://www.ml-salon.org/twitch-tv
