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This study aims to critically evaluate the trajectory of the “Child First” guiding principle for youth justice in England and Wales, which challenges adult-centric constructions of children (when they offend) as “threatening” and asserts a range of theoretical and principled assumptions about the nature of childhood and children’s evolving capacity.

Focussing on how Child First seeks to transcend the socio-historically bifurcated (polarised/dichotomised) thinking and models/strategies/frameworks of youth justice, this study examines the extent and nature of this binary thinking and its historical and contemporary influence on responses to children’s offending, latterly manifested as more hybridised (yet still discernibly bifurcated) approaches.

Analyses identified an historical and contemporary influence on bifurcated responses to offending by children in the United Kingdom/England and Wales, subsequently manifested as more hybridised (yet still discernibly bifurcated) approaches. Analyses also identified a contemporary, progressive challenge to bifurcated youth justice thinking, policy and practice through the “Child First” guiding principle.

By tracing the trajectory of Child First as an explicit, progressive challenge to previous youth justice thinking and formal “approaches”, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to question whether, in taking this approach, Child First represents a clean break with the past, or is just the latest in a series of strategic realignments in youth justice seeking to resolve inherent tensions between competing constructions of children and their behaviour.

Platform ecosystem governance is a decisive issue for orchestrators, as the motivation and behaviors of the complementors in an ecosystem can be distinctly different, shaped by the specific arrangements they have within the ecosystem. However, knowledge about adaptation in the governance of platform ecosystems is quite limited. First, the authors hardly know which obstacles are arising for orchestrators due to typical governance settings and their consequences. Second, the authors know less about governance strategies by orchestrators that help deal with these obstacles.

The authors follow an inductive, multistep case-study-based approach with multiple cases using guidelines proposed by Yin (2018). Based on predefined criteria, the authors selected 41 platform ecosystems with a “hub and spoke” system within and across several industries and collected a wide range of data. The authors conducted 14 interviews with executives of these platform ecosystems to gain further insights, transcribed and/or summarized all interviews, and analyzed the data.

Based on the dataset, the authors identify four significant obstacles and ten strategies of orchestrators in platform ecosystems. This approach allows us to gain insight into innovative approaches orchestrators conduct to cope with these challenges.

The authors already have a broad range of studies on ecosystem governance in the literature. However, research dealing with the dynamics of governance regimes is quite rare. The study examines how orchestrators of platform ecosystems react to emerging obstacles they are confronted with during the evolution of their platform ecosystems. Partly, these strategies might be expected, but mostly they show innovative approaches for handling these obstacles that have not been reported in research so far.