Hart’s Ladder of Participation: The 8 Rungs of Engagement

Hart’s Ladder of Participation is an eight-rung model, published by Roger Hart in 1992, that ranks how meaningfully young people are involved in projects and decisions that affect them. The bottom three rungs describe forms of non-participation where children or adolescents are used as props or given a false sense of influence. The upper five rungs describe progressively more genuine forms of involvement, from being informed about an adult-led project up to young people initiating and sharing decisions with adults as equals. The model has become the most widely referenced framework for thinking about youth participation, but it has also drawn persistent criticism for implying that participation is a simple climb from worse to better.

Where the Model Came From

Hart adapted his ladder from a framework political scientist Sherry Arnstein created in 1969 to describe how much power citizens actually held in government planning processes. Arnstein’s version had eight rungs too, ranging from manipulation at the bottom to citizen control at the top, and it was aimed at adult civic engagement. Hart took that structure and rebuilt it around children and young people, publishing it through UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre. The context matters: the early 1990s saw growing international attention to children’s rights, particularly after the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in 1989. Hart’s ladder gave practitioners, educators, and policymakers a visual shorthand for asking a pointed question: are we actually sharing power with young people, or are we just putting them on stage?

The Eight Rungs

The ladder’s rungs are often split into two zones. The bottom three are explicitly labeled non-participation, and Hart argued that projects operating at these levels should not call themselves participatory at all.

  • Rung 1, Manipulation: Adults use children to support a cause the children do not understand. Young people have no real comprehension of the issue and no voice in how they are being used.
  • Rung 2, Decoration: Children are given T-shirts, put on a stage, or asked to sing at an event to lend a project a child-friendly appearance. They have no meaningful role in the substance.
  • Rung 3, Tokenism: Young people are given an apparent voice, such as a seat on a panel, but have no real choice about the topic and little opportunity to form or express their own opinions.

The upper five rungs represent degrees of genuine participation, each involving more youth agency than the one below it.

  • Rung 4, Assigned but Informed: Adults decide on the project and assign roles to young people, but the young people understand the purpose, know who made the decisions, and have a meaningful role.
  • Rung 5, Consulted and Informed: Adults design and run the project, but young people’s opinions are genuinely sought, and they understand how their input will be used.
  • Rung 6, Adult-Initiated, Shared Decisions: Adults initiate the project but share decision-making power with young people. Youth have real influence over what happens.
  • Rung 7, Youth-Initiated and Directed: Young people conceive and run the project themselves. Adults may be available but do not direct.
  • Rung 8, Youth-Initiated, Shared Decisions with Adults: Young people initiate the project and invite adults to share in the decision-making as partners. Hart considered this the ideal because it combines youth leadership with adult expertise in a genuinely collaborative way.

One detail that surprises people is that Rung 8 sits above Rung 7. Hart did not see youth-only control as the pinnacle. He valued the collaborative version more, arguing that intergenerational partnership, when it is truly equal, produces better outcomes than either group working alone.

How Manipulation Can Look Like Engagement

The bottom rungs are not always easy to spot. A 2023 case study examining a youth organization that split from a parent group found that manipulation can have social, cognitive, and discursive dimensions that make it look a lot like high-level participation. Young people in the studied organization were intensely engaged in a conflict between two groups, but their engagement was channeled by adults in ways the youth did not fully grasp. The researchers noted that the boundary between vigorous participation and manipulation became blurred precisely because the youth were so involved emotionally and socially.

1SAGE Journals (Childhood). On youth participation and adult manipulation: Exploring the lowest rung of Hart’s ladder in a youth organization

This is one of the trickiest aspects of using the ladder in practice. Intensity of engagement is not the same thing as quality of participation. A young person who is passionate and vocal about a cause may still be operating at Rung 1 if they do not understand the full picture and someone else is steering their energy. The ladder asks you to look past enthusiasm and ask who holds the information, who set the agenda, and who benefits from the outcome.

Why the Ladder Gets Criticized

The most common critique is that the ladder implies participation should always be climbing upward, as if Rung 8 is universally better than Rung 5 in every context. In reality, different projects call for different levels of involvement. A pediatric hospital seeking feedback from young patients about a waiting-room redesign might appropriately operate at Rung 5 (consulted and informed), and pushing to Rung 7 (youth-initiated and directed) would not make sense for the situation. Critics argue the ladder’s linear, hierarchical structure does not capture this flexibility well.

2PubMed Central. An Application of Evidence‐Based Approaches to Engage Young People in the Design of a Global Mental Health Databank

There is also a cultural dimension to the criticism. The ladder was designed primarily with Western democratic contexts in mind. In settings where collective decision-making follows different norms, or where age-based hierarchies carry deep cultural weight, the model can feel like it is imposing one society’s ideal of empowerment onto another. A scoping review of youth engagement in HIV prevention research in sub-Saharan Africa categorized projects as having substantial, moderate, minimal, or no engagement based on how much decision-making power youth held, drawing on Hart’s framework but acknowledging that the context shaped what “meaningful” participation looked like in practice.

3PubMed Central. Youth engagement in HIV prevention intervention research in sub-Saharan Africa: a scoping review

Hart himself has noted in later writing that the ladder was never meant to suggest that every project must aim for the top rung. The non-participation rungs are what should always be avoided. Among the genuine participation rungs, the appropriate level depends on the project, the young people involved, and the context. That nuance gets lost when people treat the model as a simple hierarchy to climb.

Alternative Models That Address the Ladder’s Gaps

Several frameworks have been developed as alternatives or complements. One of the most cited is Harry Shier’s Pathways to Participation, which reframes the question away from rungs and toward organizational commitments. Rather than asking “how high up the ladder are we?” Shier’s model asks whether an organization has the openings, opportunities, and obligations in place to support five levels of involvement: listening to children, supporting them in expressing their views, taking those views into account, involving them in decision-making, and sharing power and responsibility for decisions.

4Children & Society. Pathways to participation: openings, opportunities and obligations

Shier’s model appeals to practitioners because it gives them something actionable. Instead of diagnosing where they are on a ladder, they can audit whether their organization actually has the structures to enable each level. Does the institution have a way for young people’s views to reach decision-makers? Does the schedule allow meaningful consultation rather than a rushed focus group the day before a deadline? These practical questions map more naturally onto institutional change than a rung number does.

Another influential framework is Laura Lundy’s model, developed in 2007, which breaks children’s participation into four elements: space (a safe and inclusive opportunity to form and express views), voice (being facilitated to express views), audience (views being communicated to someone with responsibility to listen), and influence (views being acted upon as appropriate). The Lundy model was designed explicitly around Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and tends to be favored in legal and policy contexts where rights language carries weight.

The Role Adults Play in Making or Breaking Participation

One of the most underdiscussed aspects of Hart’s ladder is the adult side of the equation. The higher rungs demand that adults actively share or even relinquish power, which cuts against deep institutional habits. Research on youth participatory action research in healthcare settings has found that genuine power-sharing requires adults to challenge what researchers call adultism: the structural assumption that young people are less competent, less knowledgeable, and less entitled to influence than adults. Without deliberate work against that assumption, even well-intentioned participation efforts can slide into tokenism.

5PubMed Central. Facing Power: Navigating Power Dynamics in a Youth Participatory Action Research Project Situated within a Healthcare Setting

In educational settings, the same dynamic plays out. Research on youth of color in urban schools has found that while these students are essential participants in educational decision-making, their inclusion remains the exception rather than the norm due to adultism and intersecting forms of oppression.

6Urban Education. Challenging Adultism: Centering Youth as Educational Decision Makers

Adults who facilitate participation well tend to fill several distinct roles. They build young people’s capacity through training, push youth to think more critically, help politicize issues so young people can see the power structures at play, open doors by lending institutional legitimacy, and provide continuity across time as individual youth cycle in and out of programs. The balance is delicate: too much adult guidance slides toward lower rungs, while too little can leave youth unsupported and set up to fail.

The Ladder in Practice Across Different Fields

Hart’s model was originally designed with community development and children’s rights in mind, but it has spread far beyond those origins. In urban planning, pilot workshops in the Lebanese city of Saida that engaged children in planning processes found that young participants provided valuable observations about their city that contradicted adult assumptions about children being too unknowledgeable or immature to contribute meaningfully to design decisions.

7Alexandria Engineering Journal. Integrating youth in city planning: Developing a participatory tool toward a child-friendly vision of Eastern Wastani – Saida

In health research, pediatric advisory boards have emerged as one practical mechanism for moving beyond tokenism. A case study of one such board found that researchers could successfully seek meaningful input from young people to improve study recruitment and retention, even though children and adolescents are classified as a vulnerable population requiring special ethical protections.

8PubMed Central. Creating a pediatric advisory board for engaging youth in pediatric health research: A case study

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is another domain where Hart’s framework gets applied frequently. YPAR programs position young people as co-researchers investigating issues in their own communities, which in theory places them at Rung 6 or higher on the ladder. A survey of 63 youth engaged in YPAR programming found that participants reported high levels of future orientation and resilience, and that psychological empowerment was significantly associated with higher future orientation, suggesting these programs do more than just collect data from youth.

9PubMed Central. Psychological empowerment and future orientation among adolescents in a youth participatory action research program

Measuring Whether Participation Is Real

One practical problem with the ladder is that it gives you a conceptual vocabulary but not a measurement tool. Saying you are at Rung 6 does not tell you whether the young people in your program actually feel heard or whether the power-sharing is genuine from their perspective. Researchers have worked to fill this gap. The Tiffany-Eckenrode Program Participation Scale (TEPPS) was developed as a 20-item measure capturing four dimensions of quality participation: personal development, voice and influence, safety and support, and community engagement.

10PubMed Central. A New Measure for Assessing Youth Program Participation

Another approach focuses specifically on the youth-adult relationship. A cross-national study involving young people in the United States, Malaysia, and Portugal developed and validated a brief measure of youth-adult partnership that confirmed two core dimensions: youth voice in decision-making and supportive adult relationships.

11PubMed. Conceptualizing and measuring youth-adult partnership in community programs: a cross national study

These tools matter because without them, the ladder risks becoming a self-assessment exercise where adults rate their own programs generously. The most honest evaluation of participation quality comes from asking the young people themselves whether they felt their input was genuinely sought, seriously considered, and reflected in outcomes.

What Happens to Young People Who Actually Participate

A reasonable question is whether genuine participation, the kind described by Hart’s upper rungs, actually benefits young people in measurable ways. The evidence here is encouraging, though it comes mostly from studies of civic engagement broadly rather than from evaluations that map directly onto specific rungs. A study tracking an inner-city minority cohort found that civic engagement during adolescence was associated with higher life satisfaction, more civic participation in adulthood, higher educational attainment, and lower rates of arrest.

12PubMed Central. Adolescent Civic Engagement and Adult Outcomes: An Examination among Urban Racial Minorities

A larger study using nationally representative data from over 9,000 adolescents and young adults found that all forms of civic engagement examined, including voting, volunteering, and activism, were positively associated with subsequent income and education level in adulthood.

13Child Development. Impacts of Adolescent and Young Adult Civic Engagement on Health and Socioeconomic Status in Adulthood

Longitudinal research has also traced the roots of this engagement. A study using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health found that frequency of shared activities with parents and school connection during adolescence were unique predictors of civic engagement in young adulthood, suggesting that participation does not begin at the door of a youth program but is shaped by how connected young people feel to the adults and institutions around them.

14PubMed. From adolescent connections to social capital: predictors of civic engagement in young adulthood

Legal Foundations and Their Limits

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes that children who are capable of forming their own views have the right to express those views in all matters affecting them, with their views given due weight according to age and maturity. This right is the legal backbone of the entire participation field. But despite this legal and ethical foundation, practical implementation often remains limited.

15Global Studies of Childhood. Children’s right to participate in child and youth welfare

One analysis of Dutch child protection policy documents found that embedding children’s participation in legislation and policy is a necessary prerequisite for achieving meaningful participation in practice, but it is not sufficient on its own.

16PubMed. Meaningful participation for children in the Dutch child protection system: A critical analysis of relevant provisions in policy documents

The gap between policy and practice is where the ladder becomes most useful as a diagnostic tool. Many institutions can truthfully say they have policies requiring youth involvement, but applying the ladder to their actual practices reveals that involvement often lands at Rung 3 (tokenism) rather than the Rung 5 or 6 the policy language implies. The ladder’s value is not in ranking organizations but in giving people a shared language to name what is actually happening and push for something better.

The Unresolved Question of Paying Young Participants

As co-research and co-design projects involving young people have become more common, a practical and ethical question has grown alongside them: should you pay young people for their time, and if so, how? There is currently no consensus on what constitutes ethical practice when compensating children and young people for research involvement.

17Research Ethics. Reframing payment practices for co-research for children and young people

A project engaging youth with lived experience of substance use as co-researchers found that young people valued being paid fairly, with one participant noting that using lived experience for research work can be emotionally exhausting and that compensation affirms the message that contributions are valuable. But the same project ran into significant structural barriers: delayed payments due to timesheet processing, inconsistent mailing addresses among youth partners, and institutional bureaucracy that created tension and undermined the equity the project was trying to build.

18Journal of Participatory Research Methods. Practical Considerations for Engaging Youth With Lived And/or Living Experience of Substance Use as Youth Advisors and Co-Researchers

This tension sits right at the heart of Hart’s upper rungs. If you are asking young people to share power and responsibility for decision-making, treating their time as less valuable than adult participants’ time sends a contradictory message. Yet many institutions, particularly universities and healthcare systems, have payment infrastructure designed for adult employees or professional consultants, not for teenagers. The logistics of paying a 16-year-old promptly, equitably, and without excessive paperwork turn out to be a surprisingly revealing test of whether an organization’s structures genuinely support the participation its policies promise.