Hart's Ladder of Participation
A model for thinking about different levels of children and young people's participation, from tokenism through to shared decision-making.
Roger Hart / UNICEF Innocenti Essay
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- spotting tokenistic participation
- discussing how power is shared with young people
- setting a more honest ambition for youth involvement
Three questions it helps teams ask
- Are young people informed, consulted, or sharing decisions?
- Where is participation decorative rather than influential?
- What would move this one decision one step closer to shared power?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Hart's Ladder of Participation as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- the ladder is a prompt, not a moral scorecard for every situation
- higher rungs are not automatically appropriate for every decision
- adult-initiated shared decisions can still be meaningful