Children and Youth

Please download here a literature review on children and the capability approach, updated as of March 2019. This is the result of a collective effort among TG members to help scholars and practitioners to navigate across existing materials.

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"Children and Youth Capabilities TG" is an interdisciplinary network including, among others, economists, social scientists, anthropologists, demographers, statisticians, philosophers and psychologists. It aims at developing a bottom up framework based on the capability approach to address theoretical and practical issues related to children's human development. We have organised numerous international meetings and workshops to stimulate debate on the capability approach and its theoretical and empirical applications in relation to children.  These spaces for critical dialogues have culminated in a range of publications and members may be interested in the book, Hart, C.S., Biggeri, M. & Babic, B. (Eds) (2014) Agency and Participation in Childhood and Youth: International Applications of the Capability Approach Inside and Outside of Schools (London, Bloomsbury). Other key publications for those interested in human development and children and young people include, Biggeri, M., Ballet, J. & Comim, F. (Eds) (2011) Children and the Capability Approach (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, UK) and Lessmann, O., Otto, H. & Zielger, H. (Eds) (2011) Closing the Capabilities Gap: Renegotiating Social Justice for the Young (Opladen, Barbara Budrich, Germany).

We welcome new and existing members to join us in continuing our exploration of children and young people's capabilities and the possibilities for further developing, collaborating and applying our work in this field.  If you have plans or ideas for events, projects or publications them please share details with the coordinators so we can publicise your contributions and hopefully stimulate networking among our membership.  We do have some overlapping interests with other HDCA thematic groups so please do check out their group pages too.