Focus areas
Youth & Children's Futures
Children and young people will live longest with the decisions being taken now, and have the least say in them. Education, technology, climate, institutions, inequality and peace all shape what is available to them later. They also know things about their own lives that nobody else can report, which is why their account of a problem is evidence rather than decoration.
‘Young people’ is not one constituency
Experiences of opportunity, risk and participation differ sharply between contexts and between children of different ages. Taking the long horizon of a decision seriously means holding those differences, and the agency of the people concerned, at the same time. Whether participation is possible at all usually depends on what families, communities and institutions do around it. What it does not mean is treating young people as a single bloc, or as a symbol of the future in a report.
What shapes a young person's options
Participation and agency
Considering how children and young people can participate meaningfully in research, design and decisions that affect their present and future.
Opportunity, inclusion and learning
Exploring education, learning, wellbeing and access to opportunity alongside the inequalities that shape them.
Digital and technological environments
Examining how technology and AI influence information, participation, learning and the conditions in which young people grow up.
Long-term risks and futures
Bringing climate, peace, social cohesion and emerging risks into a longer view of the futures being created now.
NoviThea’s part in it
Participation that changes the decision
Work here covers participatory research, futures thinking, evidence synthesis, capability development and co-design, scoped carefully around the governance that work with children requires. It makes the long-run implications of a present choice visible, and connects what young people know about their own lives to the decision actually being made rather than to a consultation appendix.
Decisions with a long tail
How far out does the decision reach, what do you know, and who among those affected has actually been asked?