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Young people’s involvement should lead to research, and ultimately services, that better reflect young people’s priorities and concerns. Young people with a history of treatment for alcohol and/or drug problems were actively involved in the youth social behaviour and network therapy study. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of that involvement on the study and what was learnt about involving young people in drug and alcohol research.

The initial plan was to form a young people’s advisory group (YPAG), but when this proved problematic the study explored alternative approaches in collaboration with researchers and young people. Input from 17 young people informed all key elements of the study.

Involvement of young people needs to be dynamic and flexible, with sensitivity to their personal experiences. Engagement with services was crucial both in recruiting young people and supporting their ongoing engagement. This research identified a need to critically reflect on the extent to which rhetorics of participation and involvement give rise to effective and meaningful involvement for young service users. It also highlights the need for researchers to be more flexible in response to young people’s personal circumstances, particularly when those young people are “less frequently heard”.

This research highlights the need for researchers to be more flexible in response to young people’s personal circumstances, particularly when those young people are “less frequently heard”. It highlights the danger of young people in drug and alcohol research being unintentionally disaffected from involvement through conventional approaches and instead suggests ways in which young people could be involved in influencing if and how they participate in research.

There is an apparent contradiction between dominant discourses and cultures of health services research (including patient and public involvement) that often do not sit easily with ideas of co-production and young people-centred involvement. This paper provides an alternative approach to involvement of young people that can help to enable more meaningful and effective involvement.

The flexible and young people-centred model for involvement which emerged from this work provides a template for a different approach. This may be particularly useful for those who find current practice, such as YPAG, inaccessible.

There is a growing recognition that participation in ‘shadow’ structures such as youth councils, forums and parliaments does not meet all of young people’s needs for action and engagement, and a growing emphasis on finding and recognising opportunities for young people to move out of these structures and initiate their own forms of democratic action for change. This chapter, co-written by academics and young researchers recruited from a youth council, tells the story of an action research project set up under the auspices of PARTISPACE which aimed to learn about the dynamics of self-initiated and autonomous youth participation beyond the confines of formalised youth participation structures. In this chapter, the authors explain what we all brought to the project, reflect from different perspectives on the process we went through, the challenges we encountered, the outcomes we achieved, and make sense of what we, collectively and individually, learned from the experience about different processes of participation.

Evidence (Barry, 2001; Lansdown, 2010) suggests that children often do not have the opportunity to claim their participation rights and instead the focus of professionals can sometimes be solely on the child's rights to protection or assumed needs. This imbalance results in their voices, views, opinions and input potentially being missed and unheard when concerning decision-making processes that impact on them in their day-to-day lives. This chapter will explore social pedagogical theory and social pedagogical practice, as well as values, children and young people's participation, cultivating empowerment, developing positive and authentic relationships, creating opportunities for holistic learning and working alongside children and young people in a child-centred way to bring about a positive change in their lives and increase their happiness and well-being.

This chapter explores how the ideal of autonomous ecological living – ecotopia – is created and compromised by the everyday cultural life of mainstream society. It investigates the degree to which the structures of the mainstream are eluded, changed and subverted to create ‘ecotopia’, and also how this ideal is everyday compromised to survive. Drawing on empirical research undertaken at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), this chapter argues that fragmented utopias are inevitable when attempting to live ecologically in twenty-first century Britain. However, the elusiveness of ecotopia offers an important opportunity to normalise these experiments in ecological living and emphasise their connections and capacity to inform mainstream society.

This paper aims to initiate debate about the tension between ideologies being played out in local government, as illustrated by the case of the empowerment agenda.

The paper considers a range of evidence from: academic research; government documents; personal perspectives from the author's experience as an elected member in local government; and semi‐structured interviews with a number of senior managers in local authorities in England.

The paper suggests that the development of performance management frameworks for community engagement has been a means to shift the agenda away from democratic representation to a governance agenda around empowerment. This now includes giving a role to the voluntary sector both as the voice of the people and as providers of public services. It is argued that this illustrates a tension between ideologies at work behind the facade of performance management in local government.

The paper can only sample both the extensive range of government output on the community agenda and the academic work in this area over the last few years. Nor is it examining a finished product, as the government is setting up more agencies to develop the work further. The implications of this paper are that there is a need for future academic work to relate accountability and democracy locally to new public management and its connection to the global ideology of neoliberalism.

Paralleling recent work in critical management studies, the paper links the consideration of local/national issues of democratic representation, community engagement and the role of the voluntary sector to the impact of the global ideological framework of neoliberalism.

AT intervals the rules and regulations of libraries should be scrutinized. They are not in themselves sacrosanct as is the constitution of the Realm, but many exist which no longer have serviceable qualities. Nevertheless, so long as a rule remains in force it should be operative and its application be general and impartial amongst readers; otherwise, favouritism and other ills will be charged against the library that makes variations. This being so, it is imperative that now and then revision should take place. There is to‐day a great dislike of discipline, which leads to attacks on all rules, but a few rules are necessary in order that books may be made to give the fullest service, be preserved as far as that is compatible with real use, and that equality of opportunity shall be given to all readers. What is wanted is not “no rules at all,” but good ones so constructed that they adapt themselves to the needs of readers. Anachronisms such as: the rule that in lending libraries forbids the exchange of a book on the day it is borrowed; the illegal charge for vouchers; insistence that readers shall return books for renewal; the rigid limiting of the number of readers' tickets; or a procrustean period of loan for books irrespective of their character—here are some which have gone in many places and should go in all. Our point, however, is that rules should be altered by the authority, not that the application of rules should be altered by staffs. The latter is sometimes done, and trouble usually ensues.