FROM FREIRE’S NOTION OF PARTICIPATION TO CHILDREN’S RELATIONAL AGENCY: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM AND TO THE CA APPROACH

Since the 1990s children’s participation has become mainstream among child rights and child development agencies (Jans, 2004). Despite its expansion and diversity, children’s participation has not turned into a broad-based practice in the wider development community. “More generally, the concept of participation has failed to provide a sufficiently strong theoretical basis to forge an agenda for children’s participation” (Theis, 2010, p.343). Although Sen does not address the foundations of participation as such, he states that: “The people need to be seen, in this perspective, as being actively involved –given the opportunity– in shaping their own destiny, and not just passive recipients of the fruits of cunning development programs” (Sen, 1999, p.53). Building on this, David Alexander Clark, Mario Biggeri and Alexandre Apsan Frediani (2019) recently argued that the Capability Approach to development offers a theoretical framework to understand and practice (child) participation, addressing the gap in terms of lacking its own distinctive framework. The aim of our paper is to further elaborate on this idea by addressing two interlinked problems that emerge within the CA when children’s participation is at stake. The first one is related to the concept of participation. As has been pointed out, similarly to what happens in policy documents and the models of interpretation (Hussey, 2019), participation is not well defined in the CA (Hammock, 2019), thus requiring further elaboration. This is arguably due to what seems to be a constitutive feature of the concept: as a concept, participation is ‘empty’ (Theis, 2010, p.344), it can be filled with almost anything, which is one of the reasons for its popularity. The other one is that the CA itself needs a refined concept of agency which can account for the specific agency of children. In our view, one of the issues of thinking children’s participation within the CA is that its notion of agency seems to be still largely tailored on adults (Macleod 2010 and 2014) . Indeed, the view that, when dealing with children, functionings should be privileged is a widespread view within the CA. The most common justification for this is that a certain functioning must be secured before a capability for agency can be developed: functionings such as nutrition, being sheltered and similar ones are necessary conditions in order for children to be able to grow and develop complex strategies for decision-making. Scholars have also focused on how the development of certain functionings promote, in turn, the development of certain specific capabilities (Claassen, 2014). By contrast, our starting point is that the CA can be an adequate framework for thinking about children's participation if and only if priority is given, in all circumstances, to the active involvement of children in the expansion of their capability-sets (Biggeri,Ballet, Comim, 2011; Biggeri & Karkara, 2014; Bonvin & Stoecklin, 2014 ). In order to address these problems, in this paper –building on the work of Clark, Biggeri and Frediani (2019), we will suggest that 1) the CA would benefit from integrating a concept of participation as presented in the work of Paulo Freire, for whom participation is intended as the way people (children) learn how to gain confidence and abilities to change the unjust conditions and structures of society; and that in turn 2) the CA can be a framework for the elaboration of methodologies and approaches in line with such concept. After outlining Freire’s notion of participation, the paper will discuss how it can fruitfully interact with the CA conceptual framework. We will then suggest that it represents a useful starting point to elaborate a notion of agency specific to children, that we call relational agency, which needs to be placed at the centre of any intervention aiming to foster the participation of children.