Kapwa child participation, kapwa childhood, and a path towards the indigenisation and expansion of international agreements

The Philippines has championed child participation from the drafting of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) to the creation of child participation structures in domestic and regional intergovernmental governance. This has been possible because the country has strong anchors that ground CRC in the country. We explore one such anchor, kapwa, a Filipino equivalent for the Western ‘other’ but means more as ‘shared self’ or ‘together with the person’ and identified as a core Filipino value and/or virtue ethics. Using a model of social ontology, we turn this anchor into a ground of child participation. In a kapwa ground, child participation expands from the communicative processes the CRC confines it to social engagements; from fixed and hierarchical child-adult roles to negotiated and interdependent roles. Kapwa child participation also gives way to a kapwa childhood construct that can integrate the diverse Filipino childhood constructs, a construct that acknowledges children’s vulnerability and need of protection as it acknowledges their equality with adults; children are simultaneously human beings and ‘becomings’. In this paper, we present a path, which other investigators or practitioners can follow, to domesticate and to develop alternative local discourses that could enhance global agreements.