Cosmopolitan Turn and Democratic Sentiments (CONSENT)

CONSENT is a large bilateral project between Norway and Romania. The main objective is to investigate empirically, both in Romania and Norway, to what extent the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is considered to be relevant when developing politics and law.

The project will investigate whether or not, and in what way, the rights of the child have necessary trust among the population, whether or not professional practitioners practice according to rights and also what implications crisis in child protection services impact the democratic polity (e.g. the Naustdal case). 

The main motivation behind the project is that both Romania and Norway (as well as all other European countries) are legally obligated to enforce the CRC, and both countries claim that they do. The very fact that the two countries are very different makes the project problematize a more general problem, namely the enforcement of the CRC across boundaries.

The project has the following questions:

1. How successfully is the child protected according to the rights of the child?
2. What are the determinants of the views on child rights and on child protection? What are the roles played by social trust, institutional trust and nationalism in each of the two societies?
3. What are the effects of child protection crises on democratic culture? What are the moderating factors (ex. social media, level of social trust, level of corruption)?

The questions will be answered across six work packages. The first constitute the development of the conceptual grid. A conceptual framework that exerts the rationality of the CRC, in view of which the project will draw on legal philosophy, jurisprudence (national and international), legislative history and political theory.

The second work package will study laws, public politics and administration, but it will have a particular focus on policy-development in both Romania and Norway (Data and method: document data and process-tracing/historical criticism).

The third work package will investigate to what extent the rights of the child has popular support and if it is a part of the democratic polity (Data and method: survey data and different statistical methods).

The fourth work package will investigate professional practice, and if practices enforce the rights of the child (Data and method: survey data and vignettes).

The fifth work package will investigate crisis in child protection, and their impact on the democratic culture (Data and method: document data, process-tracing).

The sixth and last work package will have a practical aim in developing policy-recommendations.

The project seeks to contribute to making the international public discourse on child protection more constructive. In particular, the project will problematize how the CRC work as a tool for governance and professional practice, and whether or not it has the popular support it claims to have across all the joints of the democratic chain of command.