- Convenors:
-
Katie Hodgkinson
(University of Leeds)
Paul Cooke (University of Leeds)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Gendered, generational & social justice
Short Abstract
Accountability in development is complex and often contradictory. Yet genuine accountability matters in negotiating competing power dynamics. This panel addresses accountability to young people in global development, examining the possibilities for genuine and radical accountable to young people.
Description
Accountability within global development is complex, and often contradictory. Power often lies with those who have the money to fund programming, meaning that accountability tends to flow upwards towards donors, rather than towards the people and communities that programmes are purportedly working with and for. Whilst the term ‘accountability’ is used regularly in development speak, scholars have long pointed to it being a ‘buzzword and fuzzword’, losing its meaning in the process of becoming trans-ideological. Yet genuine accountability matters in negotiating competing power dynamics in the development space. In programming with young people, a lack of genuine accountability to young people not only makes programmes less effective, but can limit young people’s agency and result in problematic power dynamics and serious ethical issues, especially when young people are reliant on development stakeholders for support and the provision of basic services.
In this panel, we therefore seek to unpack what accountability to young people means in development programming. We invite papers from both researchers and practitioners whose work address issues relating to this topic, including (but not limited to) those that look to address the key questions of how young people themselves understand and envision accountability and how global development processes should be accountable to them. How development researchers and practitioners can take young people’s understanding of accountability seriously. And how practitioners and policy makers can embed a more radical and youth-led approach to accountability to ensure just and effective policy and programming.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Through co-production methodologies with care-experienced children and young people, this paper offers novel insights into how youth-defined understandings of accountability to children and young people shape approaches to child protection and efficacy of interventions in childcare reform.
Paper long abstract
Possibilities for accountability to children and young people start from the point that they are involved in knowledge production about what accountability means and how it is measured in development programming and donor activities. Yet different methodologies for engaging children and young people’s participation in defining and evaluating accountability significantly shapes the impact of their participation. Youth engagement strategies that neglect multiple dynamic aspects of relational power and which do not allow sufficient time, space for support and resources limit the meaningful participation of children and young people. These engagement strategies are also connected to the practice of accountability to children and young people, and co-production and youth-led work offer the most promise.
Through co-production methodologies with care-experienced children and young people in Rwanda and South Africa, this research offers novel insights into how youth-defined understandings of accountability to children and young people shape approaches to child protection and efficacy of interventions in childcare reform. Especially novel is a youth-defined understanding of accountability that centres space to be heard and prioritises partnership, feedback loops and information and learning between adult structures and children and young people. These applications extend beyond individual development projects and can also shift the way accountability is conceptualised at the global level. This is research that is part of a two-year knowledge transfer partnership with global NGO Hope and Homes for Children.
Paper short abstract
When development claims accountability yet designs for the ‘mainstream’, what is lost? Centering Van Gujjar children’s voices, this study illuminates how genuine accountability requires radically reimagining development from young people’s own understanding of exclusion and futures.
Paper long abstract
When development claims accountability to young people yet systems remain designed for ‘mainstream’ sedentary populations, what is lost is young people’s political agency. This study centers Van Gujjar nomadic pastoral children in Mohand, Uttar Pradesh, India, to illuminate how genuine accountability requires radically reimagining development from young people’s own understanding of exclusion.
Based on fieldwork (Oct–Nov 2025) with Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra (RLEK), the research employs a child-centred survey, participatory FGDs, arts-based activities, teacher interviews and home visits, positioning children as active interpreters of the systems governing them. Theoretically grounded in Giddens’ Structuration Theory, the study links children’s agency (aspirations, reflexivity) with institutional rules/resources (documentation, digital access, school practices).
Van Gujjar children’s accounts reveal a sophisticated understanding of how barriers intersect: they articulate how documentation regimes, digital divide, and nutritional insecurity reinforce one another. The central finding is a critical paradox: young people possess the reflexivity to diagnose these failures, yet development structures remain accountable upward to donors rather than downward to these communities. By tracing how children’s insights informed the drafting of a RLEK policy brief and proposals for a digital learning space and school kitchen garden, this paper demonstrates that accountability must move beyond consultation toward co-construction. It calls for validating children’s practical consciousness as expert knowledge, transforming accountability from a bureaucratic metric into a structural practice that builds futures responsive to the actual, lived realities of marginalized youth.
Paper short abstract
This paper shares stories written by adolescent girls enrolled on a Non-Formal Education programme in Zimbabwe. It reflects on storytelling as an epistemologically distinct complement to conventional impact evaluations, centring individuals not interventions and helping to reconsider accountability.
Paper long abstract
This paper reflects on a longitudinal impact study of a Non-Formal Education (NFE) programme for adolescent girls in Zimbabwe. The study centred storytelling approaches, and between 2018-2025 a group of girls enrolled on the programme attended week-long workshops where they were supported to develop stories about key moments in their lives at that point. The stories were collectively analysed by the girls and the research team using capability theories. The study was designed to complement the large-scale external evaluation and ensure the programme’s evolution was accountable to adolescents’ perspectives. To the programme developers’ surprise and initial disappointment, however, the NFE programme only featured in some of the stories.
This paper explores the absence or de-centring of the programme. Rather than represent a failure of impact, it illustrates how storytelling, as an epistemologically distinct research approach, can support a more radical, youth-led approach to accountability in development: the storytellers, not the intervention, were the ‘main character’. By not artificially centring the intervention in their lives (as more conventional impact evaluations might) the stories provided rich insights into when and why the programme was valued by them (or not). The stories show how impact was dependent on different negotiations of power and agency in the girls’ lives, which led to changes in the programme.
Finally, the intersection of longitudinal, epistemological and ethical features in the study design enabled critical understandings of girls’ perspectives on their dual role in relation to the intervention and its evolution, and our own accountability as researchers.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines children’s participation in rural Nepali schools where “talking back” is discouraged. Drawing on child-led PAR, it shows how children negotiate agency in subtle ways and argues for rethinking accountability beyond information sharing often seen in Nepal’s development discourse.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines participation of children within rural Nepali school contexts, where “talking back” is discouraged. While the policy discourse frames participation as a right, this paper argues that such framing contradicts realities where accountability often remains oriented upwards.
The paper contributes to development debates by critically engaging with the Sociology of Childhood by reconceptualizing children as active agents of change entangled in complex, structural and cultural norms. This attaches a deeper understanding of how power, accountability, and agency are understood and participation is negotiated and contested in everyday contexts.
Empirically, the analysis draws on participatory action research conducted with children in Bhojpur, Nepal. Through PAR, the study explores how cultural norms of respect, generational hierarchies and school environments impact children’s participation. While the research is ongoing, preliminary findings highlight that children negotiate their autonomy to participate even in restrictive spaces where it may be deemed disrespectful. Children express agency in subtle and non-verbal manner that challenge prevailing assumptions in development discourse that participation equates with agency with overt expression or voice. The findings highlight that even while employing PAR, accountability cannot be assumed and hence must be cultivated through iterative, culture-sensitive and trust-based engagement.
The paper contributes to development studies by rethinking participation and accountability to children and their engagement in development programs and research. In doing so, it addresses concerns around generational justice and relational accountability grounded in lived experiences of children of the Global South; offering insights to scholars and practitioners seeking accountability for children.