International Organizations’ Involvement in Youth Unemployment as a Global Policy Field, and the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

To date, global social policy has afforded minimal attention to the ways International Organizations (IOs) have responded to youth unemployment as an important and distinctive policy field. This chapter redresses this gap in the literature by means of a critical analysis of the governance capacities of the key IOs (particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank (WB)), toward developing a wider understanding of modes of global social governance. The chapter establishes the historical context of multiple IOs’ engagements in this policy field. It focuses on the evolving relationships between the ILO and the WB and their construction of, and withdrawal from, partnerships that variously facilitated and limited the pursuit of their respective strategies and goals for alleviating youth unemployment. Focusing on the ILO’s and the WB’s policy discourses, the chapter traces the trajectories of joint partnerships that were dissolved, and of externally facing partnerships that better reflect distinctive ILO and WB priorities.