The panel was entitled ‘Supporting Children and Young People in a Changing World’ and built on an increasing recognition of the role of children's agency in mitigating the intergenerational transfer of poverty (Moncrieffe, 2009). It engaged with the views and experiences of children as well as adults to analyse the impact of social protection and social mobility through education and employment on children and young people's well-being. It also acknowledged that concepts such as well-being and agency, perhaps as a result of their ubiquity, are complex and multivalent constructs that frequently embrace their opposites (for example, agency can be ‘passive’ as well as active and is not always constructive). The papers presented used qualitative, quantitative and longitudinal data collected in settings as diverse as Indonesia, Ethiopia and the United Kingdom to address two policy questions:
Firstly, how can different types of child-sensitive social protection programmes—multi-dimensional, employment-related, and conditional cash transfer—arrest the intergenerational transfer of poverty?
Secondly, does increased access to education and employment facilitate young people's transitions out of poverty?