Social movements, INGOs, and the meaning of children’s political participation: lessons from the 1997 Oslo Working Children’s Forum

Abstract

ABSTRACT INGOs regularly take up mediating positions between young people and structures of global governance. This article explores this relationship through a particularly generative historical case: the 1997 Oslo International Conference on Child Labor and parallel Working Children’s Forum. Informed by scholarship on the internal complexity of transnational advocacy networks, it disentangles the broad category of ‘working children’s organizations and their INGO allies’. An analysis of the relationship between one INGO (the International Save the Children Alliance) and the Latin American working children’s movement (MOLACNATs) in a moment of heightened conflict unearths critical disagreements between these two transnational political actors in terms of their representational frameworks, approaches to children’s participation, and ideas about childhood itself. This demonstrates how the often-stated INGO goal of facilitating children’s participation in global governance is neither singular nor self-evident in its meaning and can be a site of contestation between child-led social movements and allied INGOs.