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Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

Gambling is well-recognised as a significant public health threat. However, current responses to gambling still primarily focus on individualised responsible gambling paradigms, which neglects to consider the range of commercial and political determinants that contribute to gambling harm and how it might influence young people's gambling attitudes and consumption intentions. This includes the marketing tactics used by the gambling industry to normalise harmful gambling products as embedded in everyday life, including in sport. Young people have demonstrated an in-depth gambling brand awareness and can even recall specific strategies used in gambling advertising that might appeal to children. There have been continuous calls for action to protect children and young people from the commercial marketing of gambling products from a range of stakeholders, including young people and their parents. Young people and their parents are very supportive of increased regulations on gambling advertising, particularly during sport, and have called for sporting teams and codes to reject sponsorship deals with gambling companies. However, a heavy reliance on industry self-regulation has meant that governments across the world have decided that the costs associated with exposing children and young people to pervasive gambling marketing are outweighed by perceived benefits that gambling provides to businesses benefiting financially from gambling. Comprehensive curbs on marketing, as seen in tobacco, are required to significantly reduce young people's exposure to gambling advertising and ultimately prevent the next generation of harm.

This opening chapter of the edited volume, Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and Their Advocates, explores activism and advocacy – by and for children and young people. It begins by considering how activism has been understood in the scholarly literature, before making a case for a broad and inclusive conceptualisation of what counts as this particular form of social action. Relatedly, it examines the contours of the relationship between activism and advocacy, drawing attention to the ways in which these concepts converge, an issue that is particularly salient when applied to the categories of child and youth. Themes that emerge in research on child and youth activism are then drawn out and we identify some of the key issues that animate this work across various disciplines. These include observations that young people have long been central to social movements, the role of social media in youth activism, the nature of child and adult relationships in social movement organisations, and some of the issues that arise for young activists in relation to intersectional identities. To this we add debates regarding the politics of recognition, questions of voice and agency, and responsibility and their temporal registers. This discussion also foreshadows themes that emerge in the chapters across this volume. Finally, we offer a reflection on some of the conceptual issues raised when considering the book in its entirety, including those of voice, responsibility for the future, the politics of possibility and hope, and the many different forms and practices that activism and advocacy for and by young people take.

Academic literature and news media on young people’s activism predominantly champions young people who align with liberal or progressive values, evident most recently in the youth-led climate strikes around the world. Research is often undertaken by scholars who see their work as advocacy for children and young people, countering deficit-based depictions of politically disengaged or ill-informed youth. Yet, this scholarship rarely includes young people whose forms of political activism align with conservative, right-wing, or even alt-right politics. Such ‘selective advocacy’ reinforces a limited picture of the who and what of young people’s political participation. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean for the field of youth studies to provide a more complex picture of young people’s activism and the necessary discomfort that emerges when the desire to advocate for young research participants conflicts with a researcher’s own political and moral concerns. Through a feminist post-structural frame, I examine media and public discourses surrounding instances of young people’s activism in conservative, right-wing, and alt-right spaces. I present the case of a conservative protest organised by a group of university students and targeting a drag queen hosted children’s story time at a library in Brisbane, Australia. This case highlights the importance of maintaining ‘epistemic uncertainty’ when it comes to the complexity of youth and activism. If we are to provide a fuller picture of youth activism, I argue that it is important not to overlook less ‘comfortable’ forms that do not neatly align with the progressive advocacy that dominates the field of youth studies.

This final chapter of this book explores the new vision set forth by the United Nations in 2021, titled ‘Our Common Agenda’. This agenda aims to provide a renewed vision and action plan for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This chapter focuses on the implications of the principle of ‘ensuring no one is left behind’ for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, with a particular focus on youth. This chapter provides a call to action for ensuring that the principle of ‘ensuring no one is left behind’ is integrated into all aspects of the 2030 Agenda. It stresses the importance of addressing the root causes of inequality and promoting inclusivity and equity in order to achieve the SDGs. This chapter provides valuable insights and guidance for policymakers, practitioners and individuals working towards a more sustainable and just future.

This final chapter of this comprehensive volume serves as a pivotal culmination, offering profound insights into the multifaceted realm of family planning, with a dedicated focus on empowering marginalized communities and advancing sustainable development. Drawing from lessons learned across diverse Asian contexts, this chapter encapsulates the critical importance of family planning as a catalyst for broader development outcomes. It underscores the empowerment of marginalized communities, integrating access to healthcare, education, economic opportunities, and gender equity as central pillars. Furthermore, this chapter delves into the unique lessons derived from the experiences of Bangladesh, a nation exemplifying remarkable strides in family planning. It also emphasizes the significance of context-specific policies, programs, and cross-country collaborations. This book’s concluding chapter presents forward-looking directions for holistic approaches, inclusivity, data-driven decision-making, partnerships, youth engagement, climate resilience, and more. This chapter not only consolidates this book’s invaluable findings but also paves the way for a future where family planning becomes an even more integral part of sustainable development.

Through association with a family member who uses substances, stigma and shame can be experienced by children and young people whose parents use substances. Such stigma and induced shame can lead to fear of being treated unfairly and for some young people the experience of bullying and discrimination from peers, adults, and practitioners. Within my research, young people often described feeling that they had ‘survived’ within their experiences of parental substance use, rather than ‘thrived’, leaving them feeling lonely and isolated from support. Stigma played a role in this survival. By understanding the stigma experienced by young people whose parents use substances, we can move beyond young people only surviving their experiences to supporting them to thrive. Within this chapter, experiences of delivering interactive workshops and teaching practitioners about the lived experiences of children and young people whose parents use substances are reflected upon. Young people who experience parental substance use want practitioners and learners to have four key takeaways when supporting or working with young people: realisation and awareness of the impacts on young people, recognition of ways young people cope, responding in ways of understanding, and resisting further stigmatisation and isolation of young people.

Climate change is recognised as a severe threat to human and planetary wellbeing. Many children and young people around the world have chosen resistance as their form of resilience in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises that threaten their current and future wellbeing. Their activism has widened the discourse pertaining to the climate emergency from a narrow focus on technical and scientific sources, bringing the discussion into broader public consciousness. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), the context for youth climate activism also reflects commitments to Māori, the Indigenous people, and to Pacific Peoples, given the ongoing impacts of histories of colonisation. This chapter draws from a range of focus group interviews with young Aotearoa (New Zealand) high school climate activists, and Māori and Pacific children and young people ranging in age from 10 into their 20s. Data were gathered during a recent small-scale project to develop a wellbeing guide which accompanies a climate change education programme for schools. It identifies the collective, collaborative leadership exhibited by these young people of diverse backgrounds, as well as their sophisticated analysis and advocacy for urgent remedies to address the climate crisis. It is argued that, instead of focussing on the blinkered continuation of restrictive assessment-driven pedagogies, teachers need to meet the moment of the current convergence of inter-related crises which include, along with the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, pandemic related exacerbation of socio-economic inequities, global conflict, and the unsustainable agenda of current global neoliberal economics. This can be done by supporting children and young people with knowledge and skills for climate action as they seek hope through active participation in endeavours to reshape their potential futures.

In this book chapter, I focus on the epistemological, ontological and axiological practice traditions that help to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions about the management of trust funds in First Nation communities. Informing this chapter is a qualitative research study involving 11 First Nation community members in Canada who were interviewed. Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing and the theory of practice architectures are used to identify the cultural discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enable and/or constrain practice. The findings reveal that Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing collide adversely with trust account decision making due to the duties and obligations guiding trust settlement agreements. The ways in which trust account practices can be transformed to ensure greater alignment with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing are outlined.

This chapter offers a reflection in the form of a three-way dialogue, exploring how peer mentoring supports our aim to contribute to the delivery of two interconnected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 3 (Health and well-being) and 11 (Sustainable cities and communities). These goals have been a constant in our practices (as heritage, public health and education professionals), and working together has been pivotal to achieving goals. The reflection is based on the collaborative experience of the three authors since 2016, recognizing how mentoring has shaped the different projects we have imagined and delivered together. Our reflection and experience engage with the notion of ‘authentic mentoring’, whereby we support each other and contribute to each other's gaps in knowledge and practice. This has occurred in a very informal and organic way, outside of more traditional definitions of mentoring, where a certain hierarchy of knowledge transmission is usually expected. This chapter narrates our collaborations across various projects and focuses on the most recent one, Outreach to Ownership (O2O) (2023), delivered for Historic England using Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Student as Partners (SaP) as our main philosophical and methodological frameworks. The O2O project allowed us to reflect on how we worked together and with our students. The students' role has evolved from peer mentors and mentees to authentic collaborators.