Children’s climate participation and voice: Games as a way to amplify children’s participatory rights in Ireland

Key Insights

• Children are important stakeholders in climate decision-making. They have the right to have their voice heard in matters affecting them.
• Children in Ireland are dissatisfied with their current levels of participation and input in climate decision-making. They do not feel heard.
• Existing channels of participation are too formal and unengaging. Children do not want to utilise existing opportunities.
• More engaging and child-friendly spaces are required for children’s climate participation. This will enable children’s voice and participation.
• Games-based participation is presented as an alternative and more engaging way for children to participate. Respects children’s rights and leads to more inclusive climate decision-making.

Importance of Children’s Climate Participation and Voice

Children are especially vulnerable to, and disproportionately affected by, present and future consequences of the global environmental crisis. Intergenerational justice requires that the present generation of decision-makers act to ensure sustainable life opportunities for coming generations. The severity of the climate crisis necessitates that all stakeholders are included in climate decision-making.

Children have the right to have their voices heard and participate in all matters affecting them. As duty-bearers, governments are obligated to translate children’s legal entitlements into real opportunities for their participation. It is imperative for children’s voices to be mainstreamed in climate decision-making.

Children’s participation is foregrounded in many of Ireland’s national and climate policies including: i) The Participation of Children and Young People in Decision-Making: Action Plan 2024 – 2028, ii) Climate Action Plan 2023, and iii) Second National Strategy on Education for Sustainable Development 2030.

These policies recognise children as key contributors to a sustainable future and commits to prioritising their voices in climate decision-making. Literature on children’s climate participation questions the extent to which policy aspirations have been translated into practice. 

Problem: Children are legally entitled to be included in climate decision-making. Children’s climate participation and voices ensures more sustainable, inclusive, and democratic outcomes. Children are dissatisfied with their current levels of participation and lack of voice in climate decision-making. However, children rarely utilise existing channels for children’s participation. Children find these too formal, bureaucratic, hard to navigate, and generally unengaging. Children require access to more child-friendly and engaging channels to enable meaningful and rights-respecting climate participation.

Solution: The Craft-My-Street project proposes games-based participation as way to bridge the importance of children’s voice in climate decision-making with the recognised need for more accessible and engaging ways for children to participate. Games present a unique and innovative opportunity for engaging children’s climate participation and voice.

Craft-My-Street

This policy brief was developed from the findings of a mixed-methods study to understand children’s experiences of climate participation in Ireland. The study draws on qualitative and quantitative data collected during playtesting workshops, interviews with teachers, and children’s research advisory groups (CRAG) hosted by the Craft-My-Street team in primary and secondary schools across Ireland. The brief iterates the importance of more participatory and children’s rights-based approach to climate decision-making as a way to ensure more sustainable and inclusive outcomes for all stakeholders.

Craft-My-Street (https://www.craftmystreet.com/) is an OurTech Challenge project, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, that explored the use of digital and analogue games as a more accessible and engaging way for children to participate in climate decision-making and for local authorities to engage with children’s voices in these areas. Craft-My-Street aims to bridge the worlds of gaming, learning, and participatory decision-making processes for climate action and sustainability with the goal of amplifying children’s voices through playful experiences. The project proposes the use of a web-based platform and gamified participatory processes as a communication and feedback mechanism between the public sector and young citizens.

Main findings of the study

• As signatory to the UNCRC, Ireland boasts a progressive policy landscape in which children’s voices are publicly recognised as valuable.
• Children recognise the seriousness of climate change and that this demands immediate and extensive action. They also recognise their status as knowledgeable, right-holding social agents able to meaningfully contribute to climate decision-making that will shape their futures.
• Teachers recognise the large extent to which children have instigated climate action thereby confirming children’s agency and capacity to respond to the climate crisis.
• Children are dissatisfied with their current levels of participation and input in climate decision-making. Children report not having enough meaningful opportunities to participate and express their views in climate decision-making and wanting to be more included in these processes. Opportunities for children’s climate participation at school level are often limited to small-scale and school-based activities like recycling, maintaining school gardens, composting, and outdoor learning. Although these are important and valuable climate actions, children do not feel upheld as joint climate decision-makers who are meaningfully included in decision-making processes about the environment. 

Solution: Games as enablers of children’s climate participation and voice

The most significant structural barrier to children’s climate participation is the inaccessibility of channels available for children to participate and express their voices and ideas. Gamified participation is a viable alternative to formal channels of participation.

• Children emphasise the importance of participation that is joyful and engaging. Those in climate decision-making positions need to conceptualise a wider, flexible, and more adaptive understanding of what children’s participation might look like in practice.
• A significant enabler of children’s climate participation was the importance of making children’s climate participation local. Teachers recognise the prevalence of concepts of environmental care and awareness in the curriculum but report that activities on climate change are basic and do not stipulate what children’s climate participation can look like in their immediate environments. In their experience, children respond more emphatically to global issues like climate change when they understand it in relation to their own contexts and when they can see how it impacts their local environments. Finding ways to embed children’s climate participation in their everyday lives and experiences not only increases their levels of care and concern for climate action but encourages children’s active citizenship both in the future and in the present.
• Most children enjoy playing online games like Minecraft, and a wide range of children are confident engaging with both digital and analogue games’. Also, children consider games to be an effective way to form and express their ideas in an authentic and engaging manner.
• Teachers recognise the value of being able to simulate real world experiences in games as a way of visualising environmental causes, consequences, and mitigations to children. Significantly, teachers argue that games are a valuable resource to the extent that it makes topics, ideas, and content contemporary to children and relates to children’s lived experiences and interests. 
• These findings are significant as it not only highlights the potential of games as a useful resource and way for children to form and express ideas in games but also emphasises the extent to which children enjoy engaging with games. This, in turn, is significant as children themselves iterate the importance of having opportunities to participate in local decision-making processes that are fun and appeal to them.
• Gamified participation is presented as a more accessible, engaging, and enjoyable channel for children’s climate participation. Games can serve as a bridge between children’s willingness to participate in climate decision-making and access to more accessible channels for their participation. The study recognises that children’s climate participation and action must go beyond games, but it argues that games offer a unique point of entry for children to express and share their climate ideas, concerns, and solutions in a more engaging, fun, child-friendly, and effective way. 

As a playable participatory planning system, Craft-My-Street’s Minecraft challenges are good examples of what gamified climate participation might look like in practice. It uses geospatial data to recreate local community environments allowing children to visualise the impact and consequences of climate change in their local contexts. Different Minecraft challenges developed by Craft-My-Street and playtested by children in workshops across Ireland, combine official geospatial and open-source data with a popular digital gaming platform to create a virtual space in which children are able to engage and come up with creative and sustainable solutions to climate challenges in their local communities. This not only provides a child-friendly and engaging way for children to participate and express their voices in climate issues but provides local authorities with direct access to children’s ideas. 

Policy Recommendations

• The opportunities for children to engage and share their ideas with climate decision-makers need to be made more accessible, and child-friendly. 
• Gamified participation is a viable alternative to formal channels of participation. It is a more accessible, user-friendly, and engaging avenue for children’s climate participation that is meaningful to children and useful to adult decision-makers. Most children report that they enjoy playing games. Games are also identified as spaces in which children can and want to express their ideas.
• As a playable participatory planning system, Craft-My-Street’s Minecraft games are a good example of what gamified climate participation might look like in practice as they give children the opportunity to imagine and explore creative climate mitigations and solutions.
• Games-based participation not only enables children to uphold their participation rights but provides local authorities and decision-makers with direct access to children’s inputs and ideas. This streamlines the participation process and increases the democratic legitimacy of climate decision-making processes. 
• Games present a way to address the gap between policy aspirations for children’s climate participation and the limited extent to which children’s voices are currently engaged in climate decision-making.
• As an alternative channel for joyful participation, games as a means of climate participation empowers children as active and included social agents, makes decision-makers accountable to upholding children’s rights, and enables more sustainable and democratically informed decision-making. 

References

Department of Children and Youth Affairs. (2015). A practical guide to including seldom-heard children and young people in decision-making. Government Publications, Dublin.

Dunlop, L., Atkinson, L., McKeown, & Van Diepen, M.T. (2021). Youth representations of environmental protest. British Educational Research Journal, 47(6):1540-1559.

Horgan, D., Forde, C., Parkes, A. & Martin, S. (2015). Children and Young people’s experience of participation in decision-making at home, in schools, and in their communities. Department of Children and Youth Affairs, Dublin. 

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report (Summary for Policymakers). https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf 

Korfiatis, K. & Petrou, S. (2021). Participation and why it matters: children’s perspectives and expressions of ownership, motivation, collective efficacy and self-efficacy, and locus of control. Environmental Education Research, 27(12):1700-1722.

Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. (2023). What is the Right to a Healthy Environment? Information Note. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2023-01/UNDP-UNEP-UNHCHR-What-is-the-Right-to-a-Healthy-Environment.pdf 

Percy-Smith, B. (2010). Councils, consultations and community: rethinking the spaces for children and young people’s participation. Children’s Geographies, 8(2):107-122.