Making a Difference: Rethinking Children and Young People’s ‘Change’

Abstract

As the final substantive chapter, this chapter examines how the powerful and affecting notions of children and young people ‘being the change’ and ‘making a difference’ have also led to the privileging of notions of self-transformation, the local and the seemingly ‘practical’. In questioning these assumptions, the chapter provides five examples that complicate how change may manifest in children and young people’s participation. More specifically, the chapter draws on empirical examples of change that is messy and unpredictable in the United Kingdom, unwanted in the United States, quantitative in Finland, radical in South Africa, and that offers a ‘strategic opportunity’ in Australia.