Month: February 2026

How can we tell if citizen participation actually works? A new framework for measuring impact

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Franziska Sörgel, Nora Weinberger, Julia Hahn, Christine Milchram and Maria Maia

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Assessing the effectiveness of citizen participation: the development of an impact scheme’.

Citizen participation has become central to research policy, yet we rarely ask the crucial follow-up question: what difference does it actually make? In our recent Evidence & Policy article, we propose an impact scheme that helps to move participation from a well-intentioned ritual to a practice with measurable, meaningful effects.   

The last decade has seen an explosion of participatory formats designed to gather citizen and stakeholder feedback on science and innovation policy. From citizens’ assemblies to co-creation workshops, public dialogue has become the new punctuation mark in research agendas and beyond. Nevertheless, a fundamental problem persists: we lack systematic ways to measure whether these processes genuinely influence research priorities or merely provide a democratic façade with little real impact. This gap matters enormously for both research institutions that invest resources in participation and for citizens who provide their time and expertise. 

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Youth research as real school improvement

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Adam M. Voight, Rosalinda Godinez, Xiaona Jin, Amirhassan Javadi, Marissa J. Panzarella and Katelyne J. Griffin-Todd

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The effects of youth participatory action research on education policy: a mixed methods study of three dozen high school projects‘, part of the Evidence & Policy Special Issue: The Role of Youth-Led Research in Policy Change.

Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) has long been celebrated for how deeply it engages young people in understanding – and acting on – the issues that shape their educational lives. But increasingly, practitioners and policymakers are recognising something larger: YPAR is not simply a youth development strategy or an engagement initiative. It is an emerging two-in-one approach that strengthens both young people and the institutions that serve them. When students conduct rigorous, locally grounded research and bring their findings to decision-makers, they simultaneously build the very ‘future-ready’ skills that educators value while generating evidence that can help schools improve.

Our study published in Evidence & Policy presents the strongest empirical demonstration of this school-level impact to date. Drawing on data from 36 discrete YPAR projects in high schools across the U.S. Midwest, it is – based on our review of the literature – the largest analysis ever conducted on the setting-level effects of YPAR. This scale matters. Much of what we previously knew about YPAR’s institutional influence came from one-off case studies or anecdotes about a particularly successful project. Those accounts are important, but they leave open a crucial question: under what conditions does youth-led research catalyse real change in schools?

By looking across dozens of projects rather than a handful, our study offers the first systematic evidence of the patterns, strategies and contexts that predict whether students’ research leads to changes in school policy, practice or culture.

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