Re-imagining policy futures: youth-led research and pathways to change - an introduction

This special issue examines how youth participatory action research (YPAR) can strengthen the use of youth-generated research evidence (URE) in policy making across schools, districts, municipalities and national systems. The issue emerges at a moment of heightened political polarization, declining public trust in expertise, and increasing scrutiny of universities and scientific institutions globally. In parallel, young people are disproportionately affected by policy decisions yet are often excluded from formal decision-making processes. These contexts raise urgent questions about how research can remain relevant, trusted and responsive while also expanding democratic participation.

YPAR offers one promising response to these challenges. As a collaborative research approach in which youth work alongside adult allies as co-researchers, YPAR positions young people to identify pressing issues, design and conduct research, and mobilize findings toward social and policy change. In doing so, it shifts youth from the role of research participants to knowledge producers and advocates. Prior research demonstrates that YPAR can generate benefits for youth, adult partners, schools, communities and the research enterprise by increasing the relevance, legitimacy and actionability of evidence.

Bringing together diverse empirical and conceptual contributions, this special issue explores the conditions under which youth-generated research informs policy and practice, whose knowledge is recognized as credible, and how evidence systems can become more inclusive of marginalized perspectives and lived experiences. Collectively, the articles argue that engaging youth as researchers is not only developmentally meaningful, but also essential for building more democratic, equitable and publicly responsive research-to-policy systems.