Editorial: PLA 42 Children's participation - evaluating effectiveness

This special issue of PLA Notes, published in October 2001, examines issues surrounding the evaluation of children's participation. It considers:

• What happens when children have opportunities to play an active role in shaping their communities and the conditions for their own well-being~• How to determine if these initiatives serve the ideals of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child~• How to make evaluation itself a partnership between children and adults.

The issue is based on a symposium on 'Children's Participation in Community Settings' held in Oslo, Norway in June 2000, and is guest edited by Louise Chawla of Kentucky State University. It also builds on PLA Notes 25, a previous special issue on children's participation, published in 1996, which focused on ethical concerns, institutional contexts, and participatory techniques.

This article was published in PLA 42: Children's Participation – Evaluating Effectiveness (October 2001). Participatory Learning and Action (PLA, formerly PLA Notes) is the world's leading series on participatory learning and action approaches and methods. PLA publishes articles on participation aimed at practitioners, researchers, academics, students and activists. All articles are peer-reviewed by an international editorial board.