A culturally grounded analytical framework for children’s rights: optimising children’s participation in Chinese community governance from a social ecology perspective

Introduction This study focuses on children’s participation in community governance in Nanjing, a pioneer in China’s child-friendly city initiative. Grounded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the social ecology theory, it develops a culturally relevant analytical framework to examine children’s participation within the context of China’s collectivist institutional framework. Methods By employing a mixed-methods approach, which combines questionnaire surveys and social media text analysis, the study explores multi-level influencing factors across the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. Results The findings reveal that the family-community synergy mechanism as a distinct feature of children’s participation in local governance, offering revision to the mesosystem dimension of traditional social ecology theory. Additionally, the study also identifies a three-stage gradient model of children’s rights realization: rights awareness, participation ability, and institutional empowerment. The core tension persists between protection and empowerment, shaped by administrative evaluation logic and structural mismatches between adult practices and children’s needs. Children’s participation is systematically influenced by individual rights awareness, familial support, community environment, policy arrangements and social perceptions. Discussion To promote meaningful participation, the study advocates for an integrated approach that leverages family, community, school, and policy resources to create a systematic empowerment mechanism that respects children’s voices and enhances their agency. The findings offer a localised analytical refinement to global children’s participation research and present practical implications for optimising child-friendly community construction and grassroots governance in China.