This paper deals with the ways of facilitating Policy Labs (PLs), which are initiatives aiming to improve collective participation in the elaboration of specific policies, through the collaboration of citizens, specialized stakeholders, and policymakers. PLs aim to give voice to citizens’ proposals and recommendations in participative democratic processes, leading to recommendations for the political system, which are at the core of deliberative democracy (Bächtiger & Goldberg 2020; Ramis-Moyano et al. 2025; Setälä & Smith 2018). PLs are developed through a series of meetings, which are grounded in different ways of empowering participants’ contributions. In initial plenary discussions, icebreaking and brainstorming allow for general ideation of proposals. Small group workshops enable the construction of practical proposals/recommendations. In final plenaries, the results of workshops are presented and discussed, leading to final proposals or recommendations. These PL meetings are managed by facilitators.

PLs have been experimented for the first time by the Council of Europe Network of Intercultural Cities with its members (2017–19). Other PLs have been activated by the European Commission in the Eastern Partnership Countries through its EU4Youth Programme (2021–22). This presentation concerns the European project Multi-Stakeholder Labs for migrants and stakeholders (MUST-a-Lab, 2022–2024), funded by the Asylum Migration and Integration Fund, in which PLs were held in six cities (in Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, and Spain) with the aim of supporting migrants’ participation in defining local policies tailored to their needs. Each PL concentrated on one or more policy issues. These issues were chosen based on local needs in the cities involved, were discussed with these cities from the planning phase onwards, and then they were subsequently discussed and renegotiated during PL meetings. This negotiation allowed participants to shape the agenda, transforming the top-down identification of issues into a hybrid model that combined top-down direction with bottom-up participation. Negotiation involved multiple stakeholders. PLs are “multi-stakeholder” because they bring together different types of stakeholders, including (a) grassroots stakeholders representing civil society, for instance, migrant or minority stakeholders; (b) influential stakeholders as civil local organizations that are experts in the PL issues; and (c) policymakers (including elected officials and executives). The PL method aims to foster fruitful exchange among stakeholders at different stages of PL activities.

In particular, the local administration of a Belgian city decided to implement a PL to recommend ways of supporting the integration of migrant-background children in the local school system. In the Belgian case, the PL meetings involved migrant-background children, adult migrants, stakeholders working in education services, and policymakers. This paper is based on the videorecording of these PL meetings and aims to show how migrant children’s proposals were facilitated during the meetings, both in small group workshops and during plenaries. In PLs, recommendations are grounded in preliminary proposals; the present analysis focuses on children’s proposals. This analysis is based on previous studies on the functions and forms of facilitation in participative meetings and the types of actions that realize this facilitation. The study adopts a qualitative method that allows for the analysis of social interactions occurring during the PL meetings.

The research question in this paper is if and in which ways facilitation can or cannot support migrant children’s proposals during PL meetings. This paper, introduces a new research method and approach to address the gap in knowledge about children’s participation and its facilitation in deliberative meetings. The next section clarifies the meaning of PL meetings and their facilitation, including facilitation of migrant children’s participation. This theoretical section is followed by a section on research methods and data collection, showing that a very small number of children participated in the PL meetings, and by a section on research results, showing how the children’s proposals were facilitated in both small group workshops and plenaries. Particularly, these two sections show two ways of dealing with children’s proposals. During small group workshops, facilitation explicitly referred to children’s previous talk or moved from one topic to another through “stepwise transitions” that is connecting to previous turns but changing the topic (Tiitinen & Lempiälä 2022). During final plenaries, facilitation frequently replaced or corrected children’s proposals. Thus, these sections show the ways in which tokenistic facilitation can limit migrant children’s participation, producing their marginalization grounded in intersectionality. The concluding section includes a general discussion on the results and some remarks about the challenge of facilitating migrant children’s proposals in meetings that aim to enhance deliberative democracy.

The realization of PLs can be contextualized in the general framework of deliberative democracy, aiming to involve citizens in the co-design and co-implementation of new public policies (Bherer, Dufour & Montambeault 2016; Cohen 2007; Landemore 2017; Min & Wong 2018). In several cases, deliberative democracy includes the implementation and facilitation of mini-publics, which are participative settings based on the recruitment of a limited number of participants who co-design specific policies (Lee 2024; Min & Wong 2018). Examples of mini-publics are consensus conferences, citizens’ juries, and citizens’ assemblies (Mehltretter Drury et al. 2021; Green, Kingzette & Neblo 2019; Knobloch & Gastil 2021; Morrell, Johnson & Black 2022; Niessen & Reuchamps 2019). PLs can be conceived as a specific way of implementing and facilitating a mini-public, which generates a democratic process that aims to empower citizens’ participation in public policies. PLs provide recommendations about these policies before reaching final public decisions, which should be guaranteed by policymakers.

Mini-publics are realized through the organization of meetings, in which social interactions are important (Asmuss & Svennnevig 2009). Particularly, deliberations are based on the presentation of proposals, which can be accepted or rejected by other participants, explicitly placing their contributions in relation to previous talk (Svennevig 2012) or moving from one topic to another through “stepwise transitions,” that is connecting to previous turns but changing the topic (Tiitinen & Lempiälä 2022). The advantage of stepwise transitions is that they can maintain cooperative relationships when discussing proposals, while offering a way to resist without explicitly disagreeing with them. However, stepwise transitions can leave out important differences in unaddressed viewpoints, so that the diverse perspectives can get lost.

Facilitation is considered a relevant criterion for the quality of democratic deliberations in mini-public meetings (Mehltretter Drury et al. 2021; Karpowitz, Raphael & Hammond 2009; Kuhar, Krmeli & Petric 2019; Wardale 2013) and an important way of handling expertise in these meetings (Moore 2012). In these meetings, facilitation aims to enhance a dialogic form of communication (Bächtiger et al. 2010; Bherer, Dufour & Montambeault 2016; Curato et al. 2017; Michels & De Graaf 2010), including empathic mutual understanding and communication, appreciation of different views, and respect for diversity (Eliasoph 2016; Green, Kingzette & Neblo 2019; Gutmann & Thompson 2004; Hannon 2020). More generally, facilitation of meetings is seen as a combination of empathy with fairness, openness, inclusiveness, attention to collaboration, respect, and unconditional positive regard (Cranston et al. 2015; Raelin 2006). Facilitation means both listening to what is being said and paying attention to the transformation that is occurring and the new possibilities that are emerging in the interaction (Fierro 2016).

Facilitation aims to encourage all participants to speak openly, promoting their responsibility for collaboration and autonomy (Auvine et al. 2022; Raelin 2013) and their equal opportunities to influence the flow of proposals and decisions, fostering this collaborative engagement and empowering their views (Raelin 2013). In other terms, facilitation supports participants’ exercise of agency. Particularly, mini-public meetings are designed to enhance citizens’ deliberative agency (Curato 2021) by encouraging them to take positions in making proposals and recommendations, expressing their personal views in contingent, dynamic, and creative ways. More generally, children’s agency has been defined as their ability to act autonomously from external conditions (James 2009). Agency is a specific form of participation, which enhances social change (James & James 2004), and social structures are seen as open to the influences of children’s agency (Oswell 2013). Thus, children’s agency can be observed as the production of choices that enhance unpredictability in these meetings, contributing to changing their trajectories (Baraldi 2022).

Participants’ exercise of agency in collaborative processes is enhanced by facilitators’ exercise of agency (Baraldi 2022; Raelin 2013) through facilitative actions, such as: (1) showing understanding, attention and interest by echoing, reaffirming, summing up, rephrasing participants’ opinions; (2) providing feedback to participants and clarifying their points of view by paraphrasing their comments; (3) sharpening the issues proposed by the participants to tease out the logic of the topic under discussion; (4) asking for information and clarification; and (5) reviewing and summarizing the meeting results, interlacing proposals and decisions (Herd 2019; Yeung 2004a). Facilitation of participants’ agency is an interactional achievement, because it is based on both facilitators and other participants’ actions (Baraldi 2022).

In mini-publics, facilitation aims to promote inclusion, ensuring that all voices are equally heard (Escobar 2019), particularly “inclusion of diverse and marginalized voices” (Rountree, Park & Richards 2024: 340), supporting “a willingness to air differences” (Karpowitz, Raphael & Hammond 2009: 17) and “disagreement and multiple positions” (Williamson & Barrat 2022: 28). Thus, “participants are fully empowered to participate effectively” (Williamson & Barrat 2022: 30). In the European project enhanced in six cities in different countries, the focus of PL meetings was on empowerment of migrant-background people in implementing local policies based on their specific needs. Particularly, in a Belgian city, this empowerment concerned migrant-background children, who were supported by facilitators, adult stakeholders, and policymakers in proposing and recommending local educational policies more attuned to their needs and better promoting their integration in the school system. The general expectation was that migrant children actively participated in PL meetings. The fulfilment of such an expectation required the facilitation of the migrant children’s exercise of agency.

Agency is considered the source of children’s “power to make decisions that impact on oneself and others and to act on them” (Sancar & Severcan 2010: 277). Agency voices children’s interests, which “are recognised through decision-making processes within which children are prominent actors” (Wyness 2018: 68), thus allowing for children’s sharing of power and full responsibility in decisions (Shier 2001) and promoting their work with the local community (Matthews 2003), in the analyzed PL meetings represented by adult migrants, stakeholders belonging to educational organizations and policymakers.

Several field studies have shown the importance of facilitating migrant children’s agency in the education systems (see Baraldi 2024; Baraldi, Farini & Ślusarczyk 2023; Ottosson, Eastmond & Cederborg 2017; Rigon, Dabaj & Conti 2023). Field research suggests that facilitation can support migrant children’s personal expressions and the interlacement of these expressions in the interaction, thus enhancing their active contributions to democratic processes. The question is if and in which way facilitation can support migrant children’s agency in PL meetings.

The form of facilitation is relevant to answer this question. Dillard (2013) differentiates among forms of passive, moderate, and involved forms of facilitation, where “involved” basically means “directive.” Von Schneidemesser, Oppold and Stasiak (2023) show that a moderate form of facilitation can favor the expression of different perspectives. An important issue is the risk of directive facilitation of meetings, that is the risk of gatekeeping of participants’ views by (1) labeling and redefining what is said by other participants, (2) assessing other participants’ proposals, and (3) inviting other participants’ compliance (Yeung 2004b). The risk is that facilitators control the decision-making process (Mroz, Yoerger & Allen 2018).

Facilitators may find it difficult to avoid directing meetings (Raelin 2006). Their skills might lead to the illusion of better “economic” outcome, but limiting the participants’ autonomous expressions, producing the unbalance of different perspectives, preventing the collective creation of change, and disabling deliberative democracy. The challenge is to protect deliberative democracy from hierarchical decision-making and power distribution (Kadlec & Friedman 2007; Schmidt 2024).

This section presents seven extracts from both small group workshops and final plenaries during PL meeting 1 and, to a lesser extent, PL meeting 2. Extract 1 shows a case of effective facilitation of children’s agency, prevalently based on minimal support. Extracts 2–4 show that the facilitator (F2) with the task of coordinating the children’s participation frequently failed in facilitating their agency in small group workshops. F2 used stepwise transitions (Tiitinen & Lempiälä 2022) to connect to children’s turns, but changing their meaning. Thus, while maintaining apparent collaborative relationships with children, F2 resisted their proposals without explicitly disagreeing with them, leaving out important children’s cultural views, which got lost in the discussion. Extracts 5–7 show that, in final plenaries, F2 directly addressed her comments to children’s proposals (Svennevig 2012), thus diminishing their agency by correcting or replacing their proposals. However, the facilitator should not be understood as the determining “individual factor” in limiting children’s agency. Rather, F2’s actions reflect a mainstream conception of migrant children’s marginalized positioning in society, based on the intersection of different factors.

The analysis of Extracts 1–7 shows the facilitator’s ways of dealing with migrant children’s agency in making proposals in the PL meetings. Only in a few cases did F2 support the children’s agency effectively, through a minimal form of facilitation, showing understanding, attention, and interest for children’s proposals, through minimal responses and appreciations. Rarely, a moderate form of facilitation (Von Schneidemesser, Oppold & Stasiak 2023) opened new possibilities for the children’s agency by making their proposals explicit through gist formulations. F2 rarely encouraged children’s agency in making proposals (Raelin 2013) and responsibility for collaboration (Auvine et al 2002), despite the children’s attempts to collaborate in the production of proposals. F2’s action rarely showed empathy, openness, inclusiveness, support, suspension of judgment, unconditional positive regard, and attention to the new possibilities emerging in the interaction (Cranston et al. 2011; Fierro 2016; Hannon, 2020; Raelin 2006). The full range of possible facilitative actions (Herd 2019; Yeung 2004a) was not applied, and the children’s empowerment (Shier 2001) was rarely pursued, so that the children could not work effectively with the adult participants in the PL meetings (Matthews 2003).

Rather, F2’s handling of expertise (Moore 2012) was based on upshot formulations, which were much more frequent than gist formulations. Upshot formulations reduced the children’s opportunities to express agency, thus they reduced their contribution to the democratic construction of proposals. F2 tried to orient and transform children’s proposals commenting on them, suggesting new proposals, correcting children’s proposals, and replacing children in the production of proposals, also supported by CW during the small group workshop in the second meeting. Thus, F2 did not contribute effectively to equalizing participants’ responsibility for the meeting (Escobar 2019) because she did not promote an effective flow of children’s proposals and children’s influence on this flow (Raelin 2013). Children could not effectively contribute to changing the outcomes of the meetings because their alternative options, thus multiple positions in the meeting (Williamson & Barrat 2022), were not examined accurately. Particularly, children and adults’ diverse perspectives on cultural issues got lost. F2 did not show willingness to air differences (Karpowitz, Raphael & Hammond 2009) and to include different voices in the meetings (Rountree, Park & Richards 2024).

This analysis shows that directive facilitation (Dillard 2013) prevailed in the interactions with children. F2’s actions produced an imbalance in the interaction because they tended to set adults’ expectations and control the process of making proposals (Mroz, Yoerger & Allen 2018). In small group workshops, F2 adopted a form of mitigated directive facilitation, expressed through stepwise transitions (Tiitinen & Lempiälä 2022). This action did not openly reject the children’s proposals and did not explicitly invite children’s compliance, but established a form of gatekeeping (Yeung 2004b) by redefining the children’s proposals. During the plenaries, F2 frequently placed corrective contributions in direct relation to children’s talk (Svennevig 2012). The facilitator of plenaries (F1) was more supportive of children’s agency, asking for details and leaving the floor to them, but she did not limit F2’s directive action.

Directive facilitation reduced the support of children’s agency in two ways. First, the facilitator (and other adult participants) expected the promotion of integration rather than cultural diversity in education. Particularly during the small group workshops, the children exercised their agency by expressing their personal cultural trajectories (Holliday & Amadasi 2020), that is, using their personal experience to claim for more attention to cultural diversity in their school. However, their stress on cultural diversity was seen as a problem, although this problem was not made explicit and was dealt with using stepwise transitions. F2 (and CW) used upshot formulations to reduce the children’s claim in favor of cultural diversity, developing the meanings of integration as neutralization of diversity. The facilitator’s action reflected a general orientation of the PL organization to children’s integration in the education system, rather than giving value to their diverse personal cultural trajectories. The dominant narrative of integration is used to underline migrant children’s adaptation to the receiving cultural system (Amadasi & Ballestri 2025), blocking their narratives of personal cultural trajectories, thus ignoring their points of view about their experience (Kämpfe & Westphal 2016), and masking conditions of inequalities regarding their conditions (de Castro 2020).

Second, F2’s way of handling expertise (Moore 2012) contributed to establishing a hierarchical interlacement of adults and children’s proposals, rather than the primacy of children’s proposals. This way of handling expertise seems to be based on the lack of awareness regarding the way of facilitating children’s agency. F2’s developmental approach based on age was particularly evident in the plenaries, where children’s answers to F1 were treated by F2 as inadequate and incomplete, thus underscoring the children’s exercise of agency. This approach was also evident in the lack of facilitation of children’s contributions about other topics regarding their education, as reported by adults from another workshop, and by the weak effort in involving the children in the final meeting, where recommendations for educational policies were produced. Overall, migrant children’s contributions were not taken seriously. Thus, an important weak point of facilitation was the underestimation of the challenging interaction between adults and children.

The conclusion is that the migrant children were victims of “epistemic injustice” (Schmidt 2024), that is, a form of internal exclusion that happens when some people (children) are believed and heard less than others (adults), based on meeting composition and facilitation, agenda setting, and choice of stakeholders. These outcomes show the importance of intersectionality, because the developmental conception of children, their migrant origins, and maybe their gender, concurred in marginalizing migrant children.

It is important to note, however, that these conditions did not discourage children from exercising agency. The children exercised agency during the PL meetings, particularly in small group workshops, but also during the plenary in PL meeting1. The children took the floor, spoke openly, and showed responsibility for participation and dialogic collaboration. They tried to promote change and influence meeting proposals. In some cases, they also claimed their agency when F2 or other adults did not support their proposals. The children were able to claim their agency simply because they were invited to do so, despite the obstacle of directive facilitation. This shows that, in situations in which migrant children are motivated to claim their needs, rights, and interests, their agency can be enhanced by the invitation to exercise it, and once invited, children can “resist” to challenging conditions in the interaction. This result highlights the effective consequence of involving children in deliberative processes, although it does not deny the strong limitations of their involvement.

Certainly, an important evolutionary task for facilitation of future (PL) meetings involving (migrant) children in deliberative processes, and an important objective of future studies, is finding ways to challenge the pressure of predefined adults’ expectations in interactions between children and adults and the effects of intersectionality. This study contributed to showing that, in order to challenge this pressure and these effects, it is necessary to avoid developmental and cultural stereotypes and rather recognize and support children’s exercise of agency and expressions of personal cultural trajectories. A data-based training, starting from real data on meeting interactions, can be an important opportunity for improving children’s participation in deliberative democracy. However, an important limitation of this paper is that it examined a single case of children’s involvement in mini-public meetings. Further studies might show different forms of facilitation of children’s agency.