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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.