Background Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is an equity-focused approach intended to generate local knowledge and democratise the production of research evidence. Aims/objectives We explore the promise and challenges of YPAR to inform education policy decision making. We focus on California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)’s Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) initiative, which requires districts to engage with diverse stakeholders to make decisions. We provide a case example of California’s Stockton Unified School District. Stockton currently uses the Peer Leaders Uniting Students’s YPAR curriculum to inform their LCAP work. Key conclusions YPAR offers opportunities for new insights, and can be implemented successfully at scale. While Stockton was doing YPAR before LCFF and LCAP existed, they enabled Stockton to expand its YPAR programming, with the goal of using YPAR evidence to provide useful information for educational decision making, policies, and programmes. For example, one YPAR project focused on student tardiness and, using data from multiple sources, proposed lengthening the passing period so that it was physically possible to walk to class in the time permitted. Here, YPAR supports those people most affected by education policy – the students – to have the power to inform decisions that affect them. YPAR can broaden the set of evidence and perspectives that decision makers review to inform policy decisions. We encourage researchers and practitioners to study and create policy structures that support using YPAR to inform policy. We also encourage policy makers to develop more policies that can facilitate the use of YPAR, in education and beyond.

We provide an overview of diverse forms of youth participation, with a focus on youth participatory action research (YPAR) and its synergies with life course intervention research to promote healthier development for young people and across the life span. We analyze why YPAR matters for research, practice, and policies related to the systems and settings in which young people develop. We also illustrate how young people perform YPAR work to improve the developmental responsiveness and equity of school and health systems, including descriptions of an innovative youth-led health center in Rwanda and a long-standing and evolving integration of YPAR into public high schools in the United States. We then briefly consider the adult capacities needed to do this work well, given that YPAR challenges typical youth-adult power relationships and broader assumptions about who can generate expert knowledge. We consider the alignment and potential challenges for integration of life course intervention research as well as YPAR and next steps for research and practice at this intersection.

Young people need opportunities that support their well-being while enabling them to take meaningful action. There has been strong interest in youth participatory action research (YPAR) as a form of sociopolitical action for marginalized youth seeking to address inequities that undermine individual and community well-being. The rapid growth of the YPAR literature in the last decade has involved studies analyzing the impact of YPAR on dimensions of youth empowerment, sociopolitical development (SPD), and well-being. The relatively new framework of Transformative Social Emotional Learning (tSEL) is potentially fruitful in identifying relevant constructs, skills, and strategies to support well-being during the YPAR process. This article seeks to advance our integrative conceptualization and analysis of the impact of YPAR by (1) considering the overlapping and unique dimensions of SPD and tSEL: agency, belonging, collaborative problem solving, curiosity, identity, societal involvement, and worldview and social analysis; and (2) applying this integrative lens to the analysis of novel data from an updated systematic review of U.S. and international YPAR studies (2015–2022). We summarize youth outcomes reported in 25 studies to assess the evidence for YPAR as an approach for promoting youth SPD and tSEL outcomes, identifying limitations and next steps for advancing our understanding of these impacts.