Small is Powerful

As a participant at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Sharon Stephens highlighted her experiences of children's participation at the conference: `Many of the young people at the conference expressed frustration with the official convention negotiations and felt that, while their presence was desired as a sign of the importance conference organizers placed on the participation of children and youth, in fact their views were not really taken seriously.' Her sensitive observations highlight the importance of analysing discourses on `children and participation' in a historical cultural context, and question the current, flourishing interest in those discourses. The aim of this article is to contribute to a discussion on how discourses on `children and participation' are deeply embedded in discursive fields other than children and their rights. Studies of participatory projects in Norway illuminate in particular an interrelatedness between constructions of childhood and constructions of sustainable local communities in Norway in the 1990s.