Youth and political participation in adverse contexts: The case of the State Youth Council of Rio Grande do Norte

Abstract

In the wake of the institutionalization of youth as a social and political category through the emergence of the National Youth Policy, specifically the strengthening of Participatory Institutions, the Government of the State of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, through the Extraordinary Secretariat for Youth (Sejurn) began the process of mobilizing and building the State Youth Council (Cejuv) in 2015. However, until the Council became effective in 2019, there were dynamics and challenges that redirected political actions, making this process less straightforward. In this sense, the aim of this article is to analyze how youth organizations took advantage of changes in government and how relational structures can explain the dynamics that enabled the process of making Cejuv effective in a national context that was adverse to participation. The methodology is based on a qualitative approach. By analyzing documents and content in the Official State Gazette and on the official websites of the Government and the Secretariat, and by conducting interviews with key players in this process, we observed that political will was influenced by the capacity for articulation and agency of the activists and social movements that shaped the relational structure of the political field in question.