![]()
![]()
This volume starts with the premise, shared by revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, that societal change requires political participation by everyone. Against the background of a 21st century global agenda for sustainable development which aspires to ensure societies “leave no one behind”, the premise is expanded to require that participation must also be equitable. It must include previously marginal or powerless groups in a variety of ways to secure the socio-economic and political reproduction of the society (Lewis 1995, Katz 2001).
Following historical mass organisation around securing full political participation rights for women and minority racial groups around the world, young people are now increasingly the subjects and objects of challenges to politics of exclusion. Hitherto, politics, in its traditional and formal senses of elections and public policymaking, has been associated with the rights and responsibilities of the “adult” and the “authoritative”, such that children were excluded and young adults faced barriers to sharing their views and seeking to influence the political landscape (Kallio and Hakli 2013). Young people, characterised as apolitical, were relegated to obscurity or else co-opted in accepted social discussion – on sports, entertainment and culture. The advent of an international development consensus on youth rights to participation, emerging from deliberations within the United Nations, has opened up new spaces for youth political activity to be seen as a legitimate pursuit at local, national and international levels. Youth participation has both become a political objective and been embedded in processes of national, regional and international development. The inclusion of youth-specific civic and political participation indicators in the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the evolution of global monitoring tools such as the global Youth Development Index are illustrative of the level of embeddedness in development (Commonwealth Secretariat 2021). Most recently, young people are highlighted as critical agents and, arguably, instruments in the global politics of post COVID-19 recovery (United Nations 2021). In a rights-based and asset-based framework, youth participation is now imperative (Briggs 2017, Pilkington, Pollock and Franc 2017, Sukarieh and Tannock 2014, Charles and Jameson-Charles 2014, Checkoway 2007).
Consequently, increasing policy prominence has prompted a wide range of analytical pursuits aimed at understanding the phenomenon of youth participation – documenting its forms, debating its relevance and utility, and theorising on its role in social and youth studies (Barrett and Pachi 2019, Walther et al. 2019, Ansell 2017, Percy-Smith et al. 2009). Less popular, and only emerging more recently, have been studies which locate youth participation as a sub-phenomenon of wider political and development analysis in small states in the global South (Swartz et al. 2021). The meaning and experiences of youth participation in the Caribbean are significantly underrepresented in the dialogue.
This collection of critical narratives on youth participation in the Caribbean has emerged against that background and in support of a project of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies of the University of the West Indies (UWI) to coordinate interdisciplinary and collaborative research on youth development. The 50/50 Youth Research Cluster, founded in 2012, brought together researchers, youth workers and practitioners, policymakers and young leaders to dialogue on the modes and spaces in which Caribbean young people engage in governance and development, including at the first Caribbean Youth Development Conference in 2015. From those discussions, established and early-career scholars associated with the cluster later agreed to empirically document the Caribbean experience as a contribution to the academic literature on youth development, youth studies, and Caribbean politics.
Making Caribbean Experiences Visible
The collection makes visible experiences from the small states of the Caribbean, which have been largely obscured in the global literature. The issue of invisibility in the literature arises, in part, from the small size of the Caribbean and the reluctance of scholars to document in areas where findings cannot be easily generalised. It is also, in part, due to a recent focus – since the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings – on analysing the implications of highly visible and large-scale protest movements among young people (Almeida and Cordero 2015). Notwithstanding a rich political history of protest and rebellion (Quinn 2004), the political culture in post-independence Anglophone Caribbean countries has more recently tended towards peaceful, structured, traditional and dutiful engagement, whether in formal or informal institutions of governance and development. In the context of small societies in which the State is reflected in close and intertwined familial and other relationships, engagement with the formal is highly desirable. In other words, Caribbean young people want to, and expect to, have a seat at the political decision-making table. To be excluded is to be marginalised from neighbours, friends and family. This does not discount the other forms of everyday political participation in informal contexts without the State or organised nodes of authority. There is still enough exclusion of some groups of youth to encourage their distrust and retreat from the State. At the same time, the prevalence of youth interest in formal governance processes in the region has made the Caribbean narrative appear at odds with the contemporary debates on youth political participation.
However, the documenting of experiences in particular geographical contexts is critical to understanding how the interests and power of youth in developing countries either coalesce with or come into conflict with the interests and power of the State or other actors holding political authority. In exploring how young people engage with the intergovernmental organisation, the State, the political party, the local governance authorit...
