HEAL Paper Classics: Rethinking Youth Participation as a “Rope Ladder”
- Post by: Anastasia Soukhov
- 11:14AM Jun 17, 2026
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HEAL Paper Classics is a monthly series highlighting influential research that has shaped conversations around youth health, equity, and the environments where young people live, learn, and grow. Each post revisits a key paper from the HEAL or closely aligned work and reflects on why it matters today.
Arunkumar, K., Bowman, D. D., Coen, S. E., El-Bagdady, M. A., Ergler, C. R., Gilliland, J. A., Mahmood A, & Paul, S. (2020). Time for a Rope Ladder?: Re-Thinking Participation through a Youth-Driven Process for Developing a Youth Advisory Council. In Learning from Arnstein’s Ladder (pp. 304-324). Routledge.
Overview: Youth participation has become a central goal in health, planning, and community research. Yet in practice, meaningful involvement of young people often falls short, constrained by power imbalances and tokenistic engagement.
This chapter offers a compelling rethinking of how we conceptualize youth participation. Drawing on the development of a Youth Advisory Council (YAC) within the HEAL Lab, the authors challenge the long-dominant metaphor of Arnstein’s “ladder of participation” and introduce an alternative: the rope ladder.
What this paper does: Rather than presenting a conventional empirical evaluation, this chapter is conceptual and practice-based, grounded in a youth-driven process.
Specifically, the authors:
- Reflect on the creation of a Youth Advisory Council designed to support child- and youth-focused health research
- Critique Arnstein’s classic ladder model, which frames participation as a fixed hierarchy from low to high engagement
- Introduce the “rope ladder” as an alternative framework for understanding participation
- Draw on real experiences working with youth to illustrate how participation actually unfolds in practice
- Emphasize co-creation, showing how youth themselves helped shape both the process and the conceptual model
Why is it a “Classic”? This work stands out because it:
- Arnstein’s ladder has shaped decades of thinking about participation. Offering a clear, compelling alternative is both bold and influential. The rope ladder better captures the messy, non-linear, and negotiated nature of real-world engagement with youth. Unlike a rigid ladder, a rope ladder can sway and respond to external forces. This captures how youth participation is shaped by changing contexts, relationships, and constraints.
- What might appear as setbacks or “slipping down” the ladder (in Arnstein’s terms) are reinterpreted as “knots” in the rope, points of tension that can ultimately reinforce and deepen engagement.
- The framework emerges directly from the lived experience of building a Youth Advisory Council (YAC), bridging conceptual work with applied insight.
- By involving young people in designing both the process and the model, the chapter embodies the participatory principles it advocates.
- By addressing tokenism and power imbalances between researchers and youth, it pushes the field toward more meaningful and just forms of engagement.
As research increasingly emphasizes co-production and lived experience, this work provides both a conceptual tool and a practical guide. It encourages us to embrace flexibility, acknowledge complexity, and design processes that respond to young people’s realities rather than forcing them into predefined models.