The Challenge of Facilitating Migrant Children’s Proposals in Deliberative Meetings: A Single Case Analysis of Policy Lab Meetings

This paper presents qualitative research on the facilitation of Policy Lab (PL) meetings held in a Belgian city. PLs are types of mini-publics that aim to apply a deliberative form of democracy by increasing citizens’ participation in the elaboration of new policies, tailored to their needs. PLs are held with the collaboration of specialized stakeholders and policymakers and include both plenaries and small group workshops. The investigated PL meetings aimed to involve migrant-background children with the aim to improve their integration in the local school system. In these PL meetings, stakeholders were adult migrants and members of education services. The paper focuses on the facilitation of the Belgian meetings, discussing the function of facilitation of migrant children’s participation in deliberative democracy. The analysis is based on the videorecording of two meetings. On the one hand, this analysis shows a directive form of facilitation limiting children’s agency, in terms of choices of ways and contents of their contributions to deliberations. On the other hand, it shows that the children are able to exercise agency and to make proposals to enhance the democratic development of school policies.