Children and young people have a right to participate and help shape society. Opportunities for participation should make it clear to future generations that active participation is a central component of a democratic system. Young people need to experience that participation can be successful and does not remain without consequences. This approach was taken up by the project "Participation and Impact".

The project, which was led by the UfU (Independent Institute for Environmental Issues), was divided into two main parts: The first step was to investigate which topics and methods young people would like to see in environmental education. For this purpose, all-day participation workshops were held throughout Germany with different age groups. A balanced regional distribution (east/west and north/south as well as urban and rural regions) and the inclusion of different types of schools or different socio-cultural backgrounds enabled a broad basis of knowledge. These findings were compared with trends in existing environmental education programmes. The creative problem-solving method "Design Thinking" helped the students to identify topics from their everyday life and to illustrate them by building prototypes. Wishes and needs in the field of environmental education were systematically worked out through the design thinking process.

The second step of the study was to measure the impact of different environmental education programmes on the target groups. To this end, an inventory of scientific findings in this regard was first conducted and discussed with representatives from science and practice. In addition, the perspective of the practitioners, who have to face the challenges of impact measurement again and again in the implementation of environmental education offers, was taken into account separately. For this purpose, workshops were held in several regions of Germany and the experiences and views of the actors regarding impact measurement with different methods were compiled. These findings were finally processed and summarised.

In a third overarching and discursive step, the two sets of topics were related to each other and initial findings were compared and discussed in workshops with the experiences of practitioners from school and out-of-school environmental education institutions.

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