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How youth can and should contribute to social change has become a major area of policy concern among global organizations working to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (DESA 2018, UNGA 2015). Global policy dialogues are increasingly calling on youth to act as leaders, partners, and ‘agents of change’ (see, for example, GPE 2022, UN 2018, USAID 2022) and the forthcoming launch of the first-ever UN Youth Office (UNGA 2022) has placed youth issues at the top of the global agenda.

The global focus on youth has created new opportunities and responsibilities for global and local gender and education stakeholders to directly engage with youth voices and assess how youth agency may contribute to wider social change. It also raises questions around expectations, and how to balance global strategies to enhance agency in one domain that may reduce well-being or increase vulnerability of youth in another, especially in crisis-affected contexts.

My doctoral study is investigating relationships between youth agency, education and gender in the Northern Triangle of Central America— how meanings and measures of youth agency used by global organizations, since 2015, are understood, interpreted or contested by local gender and education stakeholders in crisis-affected contexts in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. This process seeks to reflect on interconnections between global and local perspectives and what may be gained and lost by using globally standardized measurement.

The aim of the study is to generate useful information to enable more robust, culturally situated concepts and measures of youth agency, in relation to gender and education, to improve global development policy in crisis-affected contexts. This study takes the form of an exploratory, comparative case study, and utilizes the capability approach, feminist literature, and youth-led, participatory methods.