<p>Child-Inclusive Governance Signal Architecture: A Conceptual Framework for Translating Children's Visual Expression into Sustainability Governance Data</p>

Current sustainability governance frameworks rely on institutional indicators and adult-generated data, creating a structural blind spot: the generation most directly exposed to long-term development outcomes - children - contributes no systematic input to the measurement or prioritization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Three relevant bodies of knowledge exist independently without integration: SDG monitoring frameworks, child participation norms grounded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 12, and visual semiotic methodologies for systematically analyzing children's creative expression. No existing architecture operationalizes children's naturalistic visual expression as structured, governance-relevant data at scale. This paper introduces the Child-Inclusive Governance Signal Architecture (CIGSA) - a conceptual framework designed to bridge this gap. CIGSA comprises three sequentially interdependent components: the Visual Governance Coding Framework, a three-layer instrument for coding children's drawings against SDG categories, People-Planet-Prosperity thematic clusters, and representational narrative features; the Independent Convergence Finding, a structural validation instrument that establishes whether observed convergence between children's visual priorities and formal governance deficits arises independently of researcher framing or participant priming; and the Deficit Positioning System, a theoretical proposition that children's aggregate visual output functions as a real-time, community-embedded instrument for locating development deficits - including in domains that formal measurement infrastructure cannot reach. The architecture draws on embodied knowledge theory to establish a clear epistemological distinction between children's participatory data and the propositional, retrospective, and institutionally filtered knowledge produced by formal governance indices. CIGSA is presented as a replicable, portable architecture applicable across national and sub-national governance contexts, with implications for sustainability governance and SDG monitoring, international development organizations, enterprise Environmental, Social, and Governance materiality assessment, and civil society organizations functioning as distributed governance data infrastructure. At the theoretical level, the architecture advances a reconceptualization of children's participation - from symbolic inclusion to epistemic access.