The review, published in Health Research Policy and Systems by Janna Landwehr, Hanna Luetke Lanfer, Miriam Schierenbeck, and Leonie M. Heim-Scheffel, set out to map the landscape of participatory health research and promotion with children under the age of eighteen in Germany. The team followed the established scoping review framework of Arksey and O’Malley and adhered to PRISMA reporting guidelines, searching four databases in March and April 2024 and supplementing the results with snowballing techniques. They included empirical projects conducted between 2000 and 2024 in Germany, plus two projects from German-speaking Switzerland, that explicitly applied participatory approaches with children and addressed health-related topics. Medical intervention studies and studies limited to clinical patient groups were excluded, keeping the focus on community and public health settings.

The methodological machinery behind the review deserves attention because it reflects the field’s own standards. Data extraction relied on a structured codebook adapted from the International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research, an international network that has worked to formalize how participatory projects are described and evaluated. The codebook focused on four dimensions: the objectives of each project, the actors involved, the phases of the research process in which children participated, and the reflections offered by the original study teams. Two reviewers coded every report independently, a standard safeguard against subjective interpretation. After screening, twelve projects documented in twenty-three publications met the inclusion criteria, a modest corpus that itself says something about how sparsely this work has been reported.

What emerged from those twelve projects is a picture of participatory research that is thriving in some dimensions and underdeveloped in others. Most projects were situated in educational or communal contexts, such as schools and neighborhoods, rather than clinics or laboratories. Health-related objectives were consistently reported, and they often centered on behavioral change, for example encouraging children to move more, eat differently, or adopt healthier habits. That orientation is telling: the health goals of participatory projects frequently mirror the goals of conventional health promotion, with participation serving as a vehicle for delivering interventions rather than as an end in itself.

Participatory objectives, by contrast, were less frequent and often remained implicit. In several projects, the researchers never explicitly defined what the children were supposed to gain from participating or what degree of influence they would hold over the research process. Even more striking, participatory goals were rarely defined together with the children themselves, which raises an obvious paradox: a methodology premised on shared decision-making frequently decided, in advance and without consultation, what participation would mean. The review suggests that this vagueness is not merely a reporting problem but may reflect genuine uncertainty among research teams about how to operationalize collaboration with young people.

The structure of participation also mattered. Children typically participated alongside other adults, such as teachers, parents, or community workers, and only rarely formed the sole group of non-academic actors in a project. This mediating arrangement is understandable in practical terms, since adults often facilitate access, logistics, and ethical safeguards, but it means that children’s voices frequently arrived at the research table already filtered through adult intermediaries. The review found that participation was usually concentrated in operational phases of research, such as data collection, where children might conduct interviews with peers, take photographs, or lead mapping exercises. Involvement in conceptual phases, including defining research questions, analyzing data, and disseminating findings, was uncommon. In other words, children were often trusted to execute the work but seldom to steer it.

One of the most vibrant aspects of the German practice landscape is its methodological creativity. The reviewed projects widely used creative and arts-based techniques, including photovoice, in which children photograph their everyday environments and discuss the images; theater, in which experiences are enacted and explored; and drawing, which allows younger children to express perspectives that verbal interviews might miss. These methods are more than charming accessories. They are grounded in developmental reasoning: children’s competence to contribute to research depends on the formats through which they are invited to contribute, and visual, embodied, and playful media can shift the balance of expertise from the adult researcher toward the child. Their prevalence in the reviewed projects suggests that German teams have absorbed this lesson well, even when other dimensions of participation lagged behind.

The reflective dimension of the projects, where teams examine their own practice, showed a clear pattern of emphasis and omission. Reflections focused mainly on ethics, informed consent, and child protection, which are undeniably essential when minors are involved in research. Yet reflections on sustainability, on power relations between adults and children, and on the benefits children themselves perceived from participating were seldom addressed. This gap matters because power is the central currency of participatory research. A project can obtain every consent form and still reproduce hierarchical dynamics in which adults define the agenda, interpret the data, and claim the findings. Without deliberate attention to how power operates, the review implies, participation risks becoming a label rather than a practice.

The review also identified a systemic weakness that extends beyond any single project: reporting practices were often vague, limiting systematic assessment. Study teams described their work as participatory without specifying who decided what, at which stage, or how disagreements were resolved. This imprecision makes it nearly impossible to compare projects, accumulate evidence about what works, or hold the field accountable to its own standards. The authors argue that greater transparency in reporting participatory processes is essential to strengthen cumulative knowledge and to design genuinely meaningful, child-centered approaches. In a field whose legitimacy rests on the claim that participation improves research, opaque reporting undermines the very evidence base that justifies the approach.

The broader context gives this work its urgency. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes children as rights-holders and social actors, and this framing has given participatory health research with children increasing legitimacy over the past two decades. Germany, with its strong tradition of childhood pedagogy and public health, might seem poised to lead in this area, yet the review shows the field remains small, unevenly documented, and dominated by health goals over participatory ones. The Bielefeld team, which conducted the review without external funding as part of the first author’s doctoral dissertation, has effectively drawn the first reliable map of the territory. The map shows a field that has gained traction but has not yet fully handed children the pen. For researchers, funders, and ethicists, the message is clear: the next generation of participatory projects will be judged not only by what children helped produce, but by whether children helped decide what was worth producing in the first place.

Subject of Research: Participatory health research and health promotion with children in Germany

Article Title: Participatory health research and promotion with children in Germany: a scoping review

Article References: Landwehr, J., Luetke Lanfer, H., Schierenbeck, M., & Heim-Scheffel, L. M. (2026). Participatory health research and promotion with children in Germany: a scoping review. Health Research Policy and Systems. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-026-01544-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12961-026-01544-8

Keywords: participatory health research, health promotion, children, scoping review, Germany, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, photovoice, child participation, research ethics, health equity, Bielefeld University, power relations

The NOMOS series has long served as a flagship venue for American political and legal philosophy, bringing together scholars to interrogate a single concept from multiple angles. Each volume gathers contributions that, while authored independently, are expected to speak to one another and to a shared theme. What makes the LXVII installment notable, according to Christie’s review, is that the contributors genuinely achieve that ambition. Rather than producing a scattered collection of essays, the authors build on one another’s central theses across the book, sustaining what the reviewer describes as a connected and coherent thread from beginning to end.

At the heart of that thread is a provocative claim: climate change cannot be adequately understood without placing it within a trifecta of law, ideology, and power relations. This framing pushes back hard against the widely held assumption that the climate crisis is primarily a market failure to be corrected with the right carbon price or a technology gap to be closed with better engineering. Instead, the volume’s contributors argue that the shapes of our economies, the legal frameworks that protect them, and the ideological commitments that legitimize them are themselves constitutive parts of the problem. Fossil fuels are not simply an energy source in this account; they are entangled with what scholars call fossil capital, the accumulated economic and political power of industries whose business models depend on continued greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the volume’s most distinctive contributions, the review notes, is its political economic analysis of consumer sovereignty. In mainstream economic thought, consumers are treated as sovereign actors whose aggregate choices determine what markets produce. The contributors to the volume subject this assumption to sustained critique, asking whether the idea of consumer sovereignty obscures the way corporate power, advertising, infrastructure, and law structure the very choices individuals appear to make freely. By linking climate change to this critique, the book connects the crisis to modern economic and political regimes and to the ideologies that sustain them, suggesting that individualizing responsibility for emissions may itself serve powerful interests.

This line of argument places the volume in conversation with a growing body of scholarship that treats economic dominance as a form of oppression. Christie’s review highlights that the book offers readers an opportunity to critically assess power distributions in market relations and to ground contemporary understandings of economic dominance in the concrete realities of a warming planet. In other words, the climate crisis becomes a lens through which long-standing debates in political philosophy about domination, exploitation, and justice acquire new urgency and new empirical content. The atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, on this view, is not merely an environmental indicator but a record of who holds power and how that power has been exercised over centuries of industrial development.

The intellectual lineage behind such arguments is visible in the works the review cites as context. Matthew Huber’s Climate Change as Class War, published by Verso in 2022, argued that climate politics is inseparable from class politics and that decarbonization is a struggle over who controls production. Romain Felli’s The Great Adaptation examined how capitalism adapts to, rather than merely causes, climate catastrophe. The review’s reference list also reaches back to Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, signaling the volume’s engagement with the tradition of ideology critique, the project of exposing how ideas that appear natural or neutral serve particular material interests. Scholars of resilience and adaptation, including Mikulewicz’s critique of climate-resilient development, further inform the volume’s skepticism toward technocratic solutions that leave power relations untouched.

The breadth of epistemic frames represented in the book is one of its strengths, according to the review. Contributions draw on political philosophy, political economy, legal theory, and interdisciplinary environmental thought, and the volume is positioned to interest critical and interdisciplinary climate scholars across these fields. The subjects associated with the review itself, ranging from philosophy of economics and political economy of energy to ecocriticism and political anthropology, reflect that breadth. This interdisciplinarity matters because climate change, as the volume insists, is a complex social and economic problem that resists capture by any single discipline. The physical science of the climate system, as synthesized by bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2022 report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, establishes the urgency; the volume’s contributors argue that understanding why societies fail to respond adequately requires the analytic tools of the humanities and social sciences.

Yet the review is candid about the book’s limitations. Christie observes that although the authors advance their arguments from various epistemic frames, the volume offers no practical guideposts for readers who desire them, particularly those interested in policy and decision-making. There are no prescriptions for carbon pricing schedules, regulatory designs, or international treaty frameworks. This absence is not presented as a fatal flaw; indeed, for a volume in a philosophy series, the omission may be deliberate, reflecting a view that action without adequate diagnosis risks reproducing the very structures that produced the crisis. Still, the reviewer notes that practitioners, policymakers, and applied researchers may finish the book with a sharpened critical toolkit but without direct guidance on what to do next, and the scholarly contributions remain substantial despite this gap.

The tension the review identifies, between diagnostic depth and prescriptive clarity, mirrors a broader debate within the climate research community. One camp holds that the urgency documented by climate science demands immediate, actionable policy, and that philosophical critique is a luxury the planet cannot afford. The other camp, which this volume represents, contends that decades of policy action have failed precisely because they have not confronted the underlying distributions of power, the legal entrenchment of fossil interests, and the ideological commitments that make high-carbon lifestyles appear normal and inevitable. From this perspective, work like that collected in NOMOS LXVII is not a detour from climate action but a prerequisite for it, since solutions that ignore structure tend to shift burdens onto the vulnerable while leaving the drivers of emissions intact.

For readers seeking a rigorous, coherent, and unflinching examination of climate change as a phenomenon of law, ideology, and power, Christie’s review suggests that Cordelli and Lane’s volume delivers. It frames the crisis within the economic and political regimes that produced it, challenges comfortable assumptions about markets and consumer choice, and grounds debates about domination and justice in the realities of a warming world. Its scholarly contributions are substantial and its internal coherence notable for an edited collection. Its refusal to provide a practical roadmap will frustrate some, but it may also sharpen the questions that any adequate climate politics must eventually answer: not only how to decarbonize, but whose power must be confronted, whose ideology unmasked, and whose laws rewritten in the process.

Subject of Research: Political philosophy of climate change, examining fossil capital, consumer sovereignty, and the role of law, ideology, and power relations in the climate crisis

Article Title: Chiara Cordelli and Melissa Lane. Climate change: NOMOS LXVII

Article References: Christie, E. (2026). Chiara Cordelli and Melissa Lane. Climate change: NOMOS LXVII. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01145-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01145-5

Keywords: climate change, NOMOS, political philosophy, fossil capital, consumer sovereignty, political economy, ideology, power relations, book review, Chiara Cordelli, Melissa Lane, NYU Press