Conference Agenda

The presentation examines whether local youth strategies, which have become common practice in larger municipalities in Slovenia, can be considered a success or a failure. It questions whether having such a strategy creates inclusive community for young people and whether the document really reflects the municipality’s commitment to implementing youth-targeted measures or it primarily serves its own purpose. Local policymakers have highlighted participatory approaches as a key factor in determining whether a youth strategy becomes a good practice. This includes ensuring adequate financing and fostering collaboration among various local and national stakeholders, as well as young people themselves.

Two cities, Ljubljana and Celje, both of which have youth strategies and are considered exemplary municipalities in addressing the needs of young people, were selected as case studies. The analysis included a review of these strategic documents, as well as interviews conducted in the autumn of 2024 with policymakers, implementors, youth organisations, and youth representatives. The document analysis revealed that both strategies ambitiously address various youth-related areas, such as housing, social inclusion, and youth participation in decision-making, and propose measures to meet the needs of young people at the local level. However, discussions with youth highlighted a different perspective and brought attention to certain challenges especially in the implementation of these strategies.

As the needs and priorities of young people evolve over time, youth strategies risk becoming outdated and irrelevant to current issues, particularly as strategies in Slovenia are often designed for periods of five or even ten years. This makes it difficult to predict whether the measures needed today will still be relevant in the future. While these measures aim to address youth needs, they often follow national or European trends rather than being tailored to the specific context of a place. Although young people are usually invited to participate in local youth policy-making, they are often not adequately empowered to engage actively, leading institutional policymakers to perceive them as passive or indifferent. On the other hand, young people might claim that their participation is only symbolic and that their needs and suggestion are often overheard.

Increasing calls to place often marginalised young people’s voices at the forefront of transformation for climate change have resulted in many emerging opportunities and challenges for supporting participatory research in the sustainability field. This paper presents insight on the design and implementation of an innovative transboundary, transdisciplinary and co-productive approach developed and adopted by the CCC-CATAPULT team. CCC-CATAPULT was a four-year (2020-2024) European research project, engaging young people in Galway (Ireland), Bristol (UK), Genoa (Italy) and Tampere (Finland) that aimed to explore how young people, teachers and other key actors shaping the learning of children, understand the value-action gap in tackling the climate emergency. Within this paper, we present some critical reflections on the overall process and complexities that emerged while working across multiple cultural contexts, using the same methodological approaches to collaborate throughout the project’s duration with 15-18 year olds in all four European city region settings. The paper concludes by highlighting promising practices and lessons learned.

This contribution argues the epistemological and methodological value of art practices as participatory research tools with marginalized LGBTQ+ communities to promote transformative processes of socio-spatial justice. Through the analysis of two case studies in Rome and Lisbon, an attempt will be made to articulate reflection around (I) how such tools can stimulate participation of subaltern subjectivities, (II) promoting processes of empowerment and capacity building, and (III) mutual knowledge exchange (Asakura et al., 2020; Sakamoto, 2014; Singh et al., 2013). Although it is important to consider power imbalances between researchers and participants when conducting research, it is equally important to recognize that participants are not just passive subjects but individuals with valuable knowledge and skills who can provide innovative solutions to affect social and spatial change. In line with these premises, feminist critical contributions of standpoint epistemologies have mainly dealt with how power relations shape, determine and influence the production of knowledge by affirming the importance of interpellating corporealities (Grosz, 1993) and including the experiences of subaltern groups (Harding, 2004; Spivak, 1998) bringing the experiences of bodies and their embodied knowledge back to the center of the debate, to be investigated as geographies of proximity. These epistemological shifts have produced a proliferation of qualitative practices and methods that are considered closer to the direct experience of people and communities, re-discussing what can count as data and the ethical implications in knowledge production (Peake, 2017). Within this framework, Participatory Art Based Research (PABR) represents one of the most innovative and promising experiments in the field of methodology, nurturing a generative dialogue between artists, scientists, scholars and researchers from different backgrounds for more than two decades. PABR understands research primarily as a triangular and non-hierarchical relationship and interaction between art, science and society capable of providing crucial resources, tools and opportunities to change the relationship between institutions and social protagonism and to create research practices in society and for society. This approach is fundamental for field work, as it allows for a critique of discourses and institutions that work to maintain dominant normative structures and hierarchies fostering transformative processes (Butler & Byrne, 2008).

In the last decade, place-based approaches have been considered critical to address the territorial marginalisation of ‘left-behind’ places, and to alleviate the related spatial and socio-economic inequalities driven by uneven development. They often rely on bottom-up approaches and participatory processes, entailing the involvement of local actors in the design of territorial development strategies. However, the unequal capacities of local inhabitants to take part in those processes are rarely taken into consideration. It, therefore, emerges as a relevant issue the question of ‘left-behind’ people within ‘left-behind’ places, of those who de facto turn out to be excluded from those kinds of approaches that should contribute to more spatial justice and social equality.

The research investigates how the ‘voice’ of some people gets excluded in the context of place-based approaches to rural development, using a grounded theory approach to iteratively construct a theoretical and analytical framework for exploring the mechanisms of this exclusion. Concretely, this is done in the context of the co-construction with local actors of Smart Village strategies, integrated within the LEADER programs implemented by Local Action Groups.

Through the use of qualitative methods such as interviews, focus groups and participant observation, the research highlights how the participatory dimension of the place-based approaches may favour those people that already have the social and institutional capabilities to take part in those processes. A capability approach for regional development is therefore integrated with a more critical literature which comes from decolonial thoughts, feminists’ epistemologies and critical pedagogy in analysing how the participatory, bottom-up dimension in the development of local strategies run the risk to exclude those subjects who are less able to express their ‘voice’ within hegemonic frameworks. In particular, the research shed the light on the role that EU discourses, tools and language, together with the process of ‘projectification’ of policies, may play in exacerbating spatial and social inequalities in rural contexts and in creating power differentials in the context of public participation. The research results offer practical insights for refining place-based approaches for rural areas to ensure more equitable participation and fairest resource allocation across diverse contexts.