Practices of recognition: Strengths-based and resilience-building programmes in youth health

'Strengths-based' and 'resilience-building' interventions have attracted major attention from health policy makers and service providers, positioned as positive ways of working with young people that foreground self-determination. Yet, there is little critical analysis of what these practices entail: what counts as a 'strengths-based' or 'resilience-building' practice, and what opportunities and limitations they bring. This paper presents an analysis of the research literature to map what are considered 'strengths-based' or 'resilience-building' practices, focusing specifically on work with marginalised young people, who are commonly the focus of such practice. We drew on Honneth's plural theory of justice to focus on how these programmes operate relationally in processes of positive identity-building and resource acquisition. We found three categories of practice: (1) programmes that act at an interpersonal level on individuals through counselling and education; (2) programmes that focus on the professional assistance of caseworkers to mobilise resources for young people; and (3) a distinctly different category, 'whole of system' programmes that reconfigure the local conditions shaping young people's lives. Honneth's framework helped reveal how interpersonal practices of recognition can affirm young people's worth and status, but can also reproduce obligations of self-management and responsibility. The more ambitious system-level programmes, though rare, demonstrate the potential when interpersonal recognition is coupled with resource redistribution to alter the material and relational conditions of youth disadvantage. The most promising interventions are those that understand 'strengths' as produced through social relations and embed recognition and redistribution into the health and social systems that young people are part of.