Exploring youth agency in pursuit of gender equality norms in the era of the Sustainable Development Goals

This thesis investigates how international and local ideas of youth agency in changing gender norms align and misalign in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) era. It proposes the ‘youth as agents of change’ model based on interviews with youth-centric NGOs and a narrative analysis of development actor policy and programming. This model demonstrates development actors perpetuate youth agency in changing gender norms as: 1) youth as altruistic; 2) interpersonal norms are the locus of gender inequality; 3) individualised, liberal views of youth empowerment; and 4) normative roles for youth engagement with politics.

This thesis examines and complements the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) research programme on youth agency. Bangladesh, a GAGE programmatic country, is the site through which I exemplify the way local youth agency may be manifested in urban, affluent youth – juxtaposed against evidence on ‘youth as agents of change’ as a multi-level analysis. This thesis offers an analytical lens for youth agency in pursuit of youths’ own ideas of gender equality norms, by considering concepts of agency, structuration, and norms, in dialogue with one another. This lens is applied to the empirical data on Bangladeshi youth to suggest their agency involves: 1) voice, 2) critical consciousness development, 3) aspirations, and 4) navigating parental relationships.

This thesis finds the everyday mundanity of local-level youth agency in shifting existing gender norms which contends with the grandiosity of youth-led change suggested by international actors. Yet, the affluent, urban Bangladeshi youth share in the white, liberal feminist rationale of urban/global ‘progressivism’ as superior to local/rural ‘traditionalist’ norms, a dichotomy which this thesis explores and problematises. These findings are significant for evidencing development architecture as underpinned by neoliberal politics and a racialised approached to who will save the world, with little relevance to youth’s heterogenous realities.