Conference Agenda

The involvement of children into decision-making is a challenge to the public bodies. Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child protects the right to express their views, even in administrative decision-making it is a challenge to enforce this principle, and the involvement of the young people, especially children into local decision-making is a crucial element of the education for citizens participation. It is clear, based on the literature, that children could express their views quite effectively in local affairs, which impact them directly. It can be more significant in new democracies, where the education for active participation in public life is even more important than in those countries which have long democratic traditions and institutions.

Our paper and presentation will focus on the framework, challenges and possible solutions for the involvement of children and young people into municipal decision-making in Poland and Hungary. It should be noted that these countries belong to the new democracies, and they have started to build their new democratic local government system since the 1990s. Our paper will analyse the first regulation and solution on the involvement of young people into the local democracy, which were mainly institutionally centred, and have been based on the representation of the children. We would like to show the advantages and limitations of these representation-based solutions. Based on the limitations of these tools, new, more deliberative forms have been evolved in Poland and in Hungary and they were related on the digitalisation of decision-making and the digital environment which surrounds the young people. These models have challenges, and even these e-solutions have strong limitations.

Another important issue is to examine the possibilities to involve even the vulnerable group of children (especially children with disabilities and migrant children) into these projects. The threats and opportunities their involvement will be similarly analysed by our paper and presentation.

An important part of these activities is to build effective solutions; therefore, we would like to focus on the challenges of piloting such tools and institutions.

Based on the development of the former solutions, our paper and presentation will focus on policy recommendation for strengthening child participation at the local level in these new democracies. These recommendations will be based on the experiences of the ‘European Youth Capital 2023’ project in Lublin and the policies on the involvement of children into municipal decisioon making in Budapest. Similarly, one of the basis is the presentation is a current project (CLAP - Children's involvement in Local affairs for Active Participation) to enhance the children's participation based on a piloted in cooperation with the local authorities.

Nutrition and hydration is a ‘Cinderella subject’ in the health service. It is universally recognised that food and drink is a necessity for life - yet it is rarely recognised as part of medical and holistic care. However, there is a large volume of evidence demonstrating that poor nutrition and hydration affects health outcomes. It affects a patient’s ability to recover physically and mentally from an operation or illness, it can lead to medical complications and poorer physical and mental health outcomes. It therefore should be important to all staff involved in healthcare, whether clinical or non-clinical.

This paper analyses to what extent co-production can be developed and promoted in hierarchical contexts of governance and therefore challenges the mainstream co-production literature, which more often explores the use of co-production n collaborative governance contexts.

The selected case study is a hospital in Essex in the UK, where the co-production approaches were set in a highly regulated healthcare setting. Following a successful bid for funding from NHS England, which provided evidence of patient malnutrition as an important factor contributing to poor health outcomes, the project on which the paper is based explored how co-production could improve the food and drink experience of hospital patients and their care-givers, using the Four Co’s classification (Loeffler 2021) in order to distinguish between different types of co-production, specifically co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment.

The paper details how a series of six co-production initiatives have been co-designed by hospital staff, the patients’ panel in the hospital and Governance International, a non-profit researching the use of user and community co-production across Europe (Sardar et al. 2024). It further sets out proposals, again co-developed with all stakeholders, for how these new food and drink co-production initiatives will be monitored and evaluated as they are implemented to ensure they are given the priority they require.

Finally, the paper reviews the literature on barriers of co-production in healthcare by focussing on user, community, organisational and contextual factors conditioning the development of co-production and highlights how these factors have been tackled in the Essex hospital case study.