Introduction

Among the many invisible subjects in contemporary international politics, children and young people undoubtedly belong to those whose political agency is most strongly contested. International institutions’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic acutely exposed this invisibility and the shocking extent to which children and young people are excluded from relevant sites of crisis politics and global policy making (Hettihewa and Holzscheiter, 2020). This invisibility is all the more troubling considering that children and young people were extraordinarily affected by the pandemic as they shared experiences of disrupted education, social isolation, psychological damage, and deteriorating access to essential medical services, such as routine immunizations (Human Rights Watch, 2020; International Labor Organization, 2020; Lee, 2020; The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 2020; United Nations, 2020; Thorisdottir et al, 2021). Not only are children and youth conspicuously absent as speakers, agents, and informants in the global pandemic response, they are also indirectly under-represented through the marginal role of ministries, experts, and scholarly disciplines dealing specifically with child-and youth-related aspects in national and international pandemic governance. Has this invisibility of children and youth as agents of global health policy making been addressed in research? The answer we give in this chapter is clearly ‘no’. The overall absence of children and youth as pertinent subjects in International Relations scholarship has already been studied elsewhere. Holzscheiter (2020) highlighted the undeniable link between the low salience of young people as meaningful agents of International Relations and their limited possibilities to shape politics and law from inside international institutions.

In this chapter, we will focus more narrowly on questions of political representation and agency of young people in global health, in itself a muchneglected issue so far, at least until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter starts from the observation that there is a significant discrepancy between a broad endorsement for the codified norm of child participation, on the one hand, and the actual possibilities for political representation of young people, on the other hand. While child participation as established in Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, ‘the right to be heard’) enjoys wide support among international institutions, formal access rules along with further institutional, material, and performative aspects continue to limit meaningful participation of young people in salient international forums.