Chapter 5 by Olga Paredes Brítez

Municipal Youth Policies and Participation in Argentina and Paraguay

Youth officially became a matter of public policy in Latin America in the 1980s, when specialised state agencies were created to institutionalise youth policies. In Argentina and Paraguay, the emergence of these policies coincided with the return of democracy after military dictatorships, with young people playing a significant role in the democratic transitions. This highlights the direct relationship between democracy, youth participation, and the development of youth policy.

The advent of democracy in Argentina and Paraguay occurred at the same time as decentralisation and municipalisation processes. Municipal governments have a strategic role in youth policies because of their territorial proximity and their capacity to create specific institutional arrangements for youth participation.^[i] In Paraguay, the first democratically elected municipal government after the dictatorship created the country’s first official youth policy unit, before any national institutionalisation.^[ii] Despite the importance of specialised youth services in local governments, however, obstacles such as resource shortages and difficulties in ensuring effective and sustained youth participation remain.

The concept of youth constructed by a state is fundamental in defining the approach of its policies. This approach can take one of two forms. It can be transitional, focused on helping young people enter adulthood through employment and education.^[iii] Or it can be affirmative, based on an understanding of youth as a social condition and aimed at promoting identity building and participation.^[iv]

Given the tension between these two approaches, and in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, this study seeks to answer the following question: How did the municipal governments of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Asunción (Paraguay) – with their structural differences but common challenges – develop youth policies and promote youth participation in the period surrounding the pandemic?

Methodology

This chapter analyses how the municipal governments of Buenos Aires and Asunción addressed youth policies and participation between 2016 and 2024. The study examines regulatory frameworks, prevailing policy approaches, forms of youth participation – both institutionalised and non-institutionalised – and youth involvement across different stages of the policy cycle.

Buenos Aires and Asunción were chosen as case studies because of their status as national capitals and their political and institutional relevance. This allowed for the identification of shared challenges in the development of municipal youth policies across different national contexts.

The research adopted a qualitative approach based on semistructured interviews with key interlocutors, including current and former municipal youth directors and academic experts in youth studies in both cities. Participants were selected based on their institutional roles and academic experience in the field. Interviews were structured around the main research categories – youth policies and youth participation – and were transcribed and analysed thematically to identify patterns, similarities, and differences relevant to the study’s objectives.

The study period includes the Covid-19 pandemic, which is a contextual factor that helps explain changes in youth policies and participation mechanisms, particularly in relation to education, employment, and mental health.

Youth policies in Buenos Aires and Asunción

Municipal youth policies, because of their territorial proximity and institutional location, tend to offer greater opportunities for youth participation than national policies. However, these opportunities are neither automatic nor homogeneous. They are shaped by the extent of legal frameworks, the prevailing policy approaches, and the ways in which youth participation is promoted across different stages of the policy cycle.

Legal frameworks

At the municipal level, the strength of legal frameworks is central in determining whether proximity translates into effective youth participation. Legal frameworks not only define institutional responsibilities and policy continuity but also affect the extent to which youth participation can become a stable component of public action.

In both Argentina and Paraguay, the absence of such frameworks is evident. Despite the existence of youth departments or programmes, neither country has enacted a comprehensive youth law that structures responsibilities or guarantees institutional continuity. Both countries display regulatory gaps across three normative levels: constitutional, functional, and administrative.

Argentina lacks an explicit constitutional recognition of young people as subjects of rights, while Paraguay mentions the promotion of youth participation only in one article of its constitution. At the national level, both countries have partial sectoral laws – on education, health, and employment – that address young people tangentially and often contradict one another. In Buenos Aires, there is a law mandating a youth survey, whereas in Asunción, no relevant municipal regulation on young people exists.

This absence of comprehensive frameworks reflects weak institutionalisation. This perception was shared by both former municipal youth directors and academic experts interviewed, who emphasised that youth policies depend largely on political contingencies and institutional voluntarism.

Approaches to youth policies

Interviews with former municipal youth directors revealed that youth policies in both Buenos Aires and Asunción have been structured around a limited set of priorities. Employability and scholarships emerged as the most consolidated lines of action, alongside fragmented recreational initiatives.

Based on interviewee testimonies, it is clear that a transitional approach to youth policies predominates in both cities. This approach places the responsibility for young people’s transition into adulthood primarily on the youth themselves, while underestimating structural constraints, such as poverty, territorial inequality, and digital exclusion.^[v]

In Buenos Aires, this logic is particularly evident. Employability is the basis for training programmes, first-job initiatives, and links with productive sectors, reinforcing young people’s functional role in the system.

In Asunción, in contrast, the most consolidated youth policy is the provision of university scholarships, which reflects a selective and individualist response to youth inequality. Beyond this central policy, youth action largely emphasises leisure and recreational initiatives – particularly sports and entertainment activities – without being embedded in a broader transitional or rights-based framework.

This approach may operate as a form of symbolic containment rather than structural intervention, diverting attention from deeper social inequalities and potentially aggravating young people’s vulnerabilities.^[vi] As a result, a third paradigm emerges – one that neither systematically supports young people’s transition to adulthood nor affirms their autonomy. Instead, this third way seeks to manage youth presence through fragmented and depoliticised interventions, mainly recreational programmes.

Interviews with former youth directors in both cities revealed a shared willingness to advance towards affirmative, rights-based policies – such as youth participatory budgets or civic programmes – that conceive of young people not merely as students or future workers but as full citizens. These efforts, however, are consistently constrained by institutional fragilities, budgetary restrictions, and the absence of a strategic vision that can consolidate young people as transformative political actors within municipal governance.

Historical and social context

Historical and political trajectories play a central role in shaping approaches to youth policy. During the democratic transitions that followed the two countries’ military dictatorships (Argentina in 1983, Paraguay in 1989), youth participation was strongly promoted through affirmative policies that emphasised political engagement.^[vii]

However, this approach shifted in the 1990s with the advance of neoliberal reforms, particularly in Argentina, where so-called excluded youth were increasingly framed as policy targets through employability and vocational training initiatives.^[viii] In Buenos Aires, successive municipal administrations consolidated this employability-centred axis within youth policies.

In contrast, in Asunción, youth policies were progressively hollowed out. Participatory spaces were weakened and municipal action was redirected towards sports and recreational programmes, often focused on children and early adolescents, rather than young people as political subjects.

As of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic acted as a stress test for already fragile institutional frameworks: it weakened policy capacities, displaced young people from the social policy agenda, and reinforced control-oriented narratives. In this context, youth issues were not only pushed to the margins of public policy, but young people also came to be framed as expendable in public-health terms.

At the same time, pandemic-related lockdowns exposed long-neglected problems – particularly young people’s mental health and suicide – revealing structural vulnerabilities that predated the pandemic. However, these warning signs were not followed by robust youth mental health policies, underscoring a persistent disconnect between recognising the problems and delivering effective policy action.

Based on the collected testimonies, it can be concluded that Buenos Aires exemplifies a transitional, employability-centred approach, while Asunción illustrates symbolic containment within a weaker institutional environment.

Youth participation: institutionalised and non-institutionalised

Youth participation at the municipal level has taken place through a combination of weakly institutionalised mechanisms, such as ad hoc councils or consultations, and a wide range of non-institutionalised practices, including protests, cultural activism, and digital mobilisation.

Youth policies are not solely a product of state design; they are also the result of social struggles and the participation of collective actors.^[ix] In Argentina, the state recognised pre-existing youth movements, illustrating how youth participation can precede and shape public policy.^[x] In Paraguay, participation has shown peaks of visibility, yet repression and criminalisation continue to inhibit its institutional consolidation.^[xi]

The field of youth participation is marked by a tension between a restrictive understanding of the term, which equates it with partisan or union activism, and a broader conception that acknowledges the political nature of unconventional practices, such as cultural activism, street art, social networks, or protests.^[xii] Today, non-institutionalised participation is highly significant yet rarely recognised by public policy.^[xiii]

Empirical evidence reveals a paradox of low effective youth participation in decision-making alongside a high desire to participate.^[xiv] A central explanation for this paradox lies in the tension between recognition and autonomy: youth collectives seek the state’s validation to influence policies while preserving their independence from official frameworks. In practice, the two forms of participation are interdependent: the institutionalised form opens stable channels, while the non-institutionalised form innovates, monitors, and exerts pressure, sustaining a dynamic ecosystem of civic engagement.

When it comes to institutionalised participation, voting is the most widespread – and, in many cases, the only – guaranteed mechanism. Beyond suffrage, there is a striking lack of structured spaces, such as local youth councils, whose existence is almost entirely at the discretion of the municipal administration. This reveals a pattern of institutional fragility: in the absence of binding legal frameworks, participatory bodies are exposed to shifts in administrations’ priorities, as evidenced by the dissolution of youth councils in Asunción and similar experiences in Buenos Aires.

The Covid-19 pandemic deepened this split, weakening formal participation while accelerating online engagement. A strong form of solidarity-based youth participation emerged, expressed through networks of mutual aid and community organisation in response to urgent social needs.^[xv] Young women, despite facing care burdens and precarious conditions, led numerous collective actions. This dynamic reflects a form of resilient youth participation, in which political engagement persists despite structural constraints. These experiences strengthened organisational capacity, social bonds, and political commitment within initiatives marked by strong local youth involvement.

According to one interviewee, Buenos Aires presented a more consolidated tradition of non-institutionalised participation, such as anti-neoliberal resistance, student movements, feminist mobilisations, and rights-based agendas.^[xvi] In contrast, another informant said that in Paraguay, civic participation had been structurally weakened across social sectors, also affecting youth participation, which tended to emerge only episodically and under adverse conditions.^[xvii] This context of weakened institutional support and higher risks of repression helps explain the intermittent visibility of youth mobilisation in Asunción.

In both cases, overcoming the paradox of low participation despite a high desire for it requires broadening the frameworks of recognition for institutionalised participation while acknowledging non-institutional forms of engagement. It is essential to ensure fair access to participation – in terms of time, resources, and connectivity – and link territorial and solidarity-based practices with decision-making mechanisms that give young people real influence in the public sphere.

The Covid-19 pandemic did not result in the creation of new or sustained municipal mechanisms for youth participation in either city. Instead, it tended to weaken already fragile institutional spaces while shifting youth involvement towards informal, solidarity-based, and digital practices. Although local governments temporarily increased contact with young people through emergency responses, these interactions did not translate into more binding or permanent participatory arrangements. In this sense, the pandemic acted less as a catalyst for institutional innovation than as a stress test that exposed the limited depth of participatory governance at the municipal level.

Participation across the policy cycle

According to former youth directors interviewed, youth participation across the policy cycle in Buenos Aires and Asunción is uneven. Young people have minimal influence on the formulation and implementation of youth policies and virtually no involvement in their evaluation.

The diagnostic phase of policymaking shows some noteworthy elements, such as surveys that seek to identify young people’s priorities and demands. These instruments provide valuable inputs into decision-making and help strengthen the legitimacy of public policies. However, youth participation in decision-making is still a main challenge facing local youth policies in Latin America.^[xviii]

There are some exceptions, such as the participation of young civil servants in governmental spaces, for example through youth cabinets, which introduce a generational perspective to public administrations. Yet this form of participation has clear limitations: it is largely restricted to young people with political and institutional capital, and their influence depends on hierarchical structures that do not always value or incorporate their contributions.

During the implementation phase, participation becomes even more diluted, with limited articulation between design and execution. Although the youth presence may be more visible at this stage, it is often reduced to moments of public exposure or interaction, rather than meaningful involvement in policy design or decision-making. Young people are sometimes invited to receive benefits, such as scholarships or material resources, but are rarely involved in the processes through which these policies are formulated. Participatory processes tend to generate less political visibility and impact than symbolic acts such as public events or photographs, contributing to the absence of sustained spaces for participation.^[xix]

Most critical is the evaluation phase, where youth participation is virtually nonexistent. This absence reflects a weak evaluation culture across the region.^[xx] This limits the possibility of understanding the real impacts of youth policies and of incorporating young people’s perspectives into assessment processes.

Overall, youth participation throughout the public policy cycle is sporadic, discontinuous, and marginal. Rather than a cross-cutting dimension of public action, participation is treated as an accessory or symbolic element. Overcoming this limitation requires a shift towards participatory governance models in which young people are not merely recipients but co-creators and evaluators of the policies that affect them.

Conclusions

In both Buenos Aires and Asunción, the legal frameworks for youth policies are limited. Neither Argentina nor Paraguay has a comprehensive national youth law, and frameworks are fragmented across sectors. In both contexts, the institutional architecture is weak and discontinuous: youth departments typically depend on other secretariats and lack resources and clear mandates. This results in an institutional hollowing out: regulations without enforcement, programmes without stable funding, and participatory mechanisms that operate intermittently.

In terms of policy approaches, a transitional perspective of young people as “adults in the making” persists. In Buenos Aires, the state’s interventions are aimed at young people’s employability; in Asunción, a bias towards leisure and sports prevails. This pattern reproduces an adult-centric view that limits recognition of young people as political subjects. The Covid-19 pandemic did not correct these trends; rather, it deepened institutional fragmentation, reinforced punitive narratives, and displaced young people from the policy agenda, even as it exposed critical issues, such as mental health, digital inequality, and labour precarity.

As for participation, a clear tension exists between fragile institutional formats, such as councils and ad hoc consultations, and non-institutionalised forms, like cultural activism, digital interventions, and protests, which highlight young people’s civic vitality but are undervalued by local governments.

Across the policy cycle, youth involvement is sporadic: it appears in isolated diagnostic exercises, rarely influences policymaking, weakens during implementation, and is nearly absent at the evaluation stage.

In sum, without structural changes in legal frameworks, intersectoral governance, and binding participation mechanisms, municipal youth policies will continue to be fragile, reactive, and of low transformative impact – though with strong latent potential from the local level.

Beyond the specific cases analysed, this study suggests that the municipal level is a politically strategic – albeit fragile – arena for youth citizenship in contexts where national commitments to young people are weak or regressing. While local governments do not escape structural constraints, their territorial embeddedness enables forms of interaction, recognition, and experimentation that are largely inaccessible at higher levels of governance. The challenge, therefore, is not to idealise municipal youth policies but to recognise their potential as spaces where youth citizenship can still be contested, negotiated, and, under certain conditions, expanded.

Recommendations

Advancing municipal youth policies requires strengthening rights-based legal frameworks at the local level. Municipal rules should define clear objectives, competencies, organisational structures, budgets, and accountability mechanisms, including non-regression clauses to ensure policy continuity across administrations.

At the same time, it is essential to institutionalise binding participation mechanisms, such as local youth councils with deliberative functions throughout the policy cycle. These should be complemented by tools like youth participatory budgets and public hearings that ensure intersectional representation.

Effective youth policies also demand intersectoral governance that links areas such as health, education, labour, culture, the environment, and housing, supported by shared goals, indicators, and transparent monitoring. Recognising non-institutionalised participation is equally important. Cultural activism, digital networks, and community-based initiatives should be integrated as legitimate sources of diagnosis and innovation, with funding and technical support for youth-led projects.

Finally, strengthening state capacity through professionalised teams, specialised training, and merit-based recruitment is crucial for moving towards a comprehensive, participatory, and sustainable youth policy agenda.

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[i] Olga Paredes Brítez, “Políticas municipales de juventud como políticas urbanas: análisis de su gestión en Asunción (Paraguay) y su área metropolitana (2015–2020)” [Municipal youth policies as urban policies: analysis of their management in Asunción (Paraguay) and its metropolitan area (2015–2020)], Año 9, no. 16 (2025): 141–60.

[ii] Olga Paredes-Britez, “Políticas de juventud en Paraguay: gestión a nivel nacional y municipal” [Youth policies in Paraguay: management at national and municipal levels], Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud 24, no. 1 (2026): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.11600/rlcsnj.24.1.7166.

[iii] Joaquim Casal, “TVA y políticas sobre juventud” [TVA and youth policies], Revista de Estudios de Juventud 59 (2002): 1–13.

[iv] Sergio Balardini, “De los jóvenes, la juventud y las políticas de juventud” [On young people, youth, and youth policies], Última Década 8, no. 13 (2000): 11–24, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-22362000000200002.

[v] Author interview with Diego Beretta, online, 2025.

[vi] Andrea Bonvillani, “Juvenicidio: un concepto parido por el dolor. Reflexiones desde una revisión bibliográfica” [Youthicide: a concept born of pain. Reflections from a literature review], Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud 20, no. 3 (2022): 417–42, https://doi.org/10.11600/rlcsnj.20.3.5548.

[vii] Diego Beretta, “Políticas de juventudes en democracia. Itinerarios recorridos” [Youth policies in democracy. Paths explored], Temas y Debates, 2023, https://temasydebates.unr.edu.ar/index.php/tyd/article/view/631; Paredes Brítez, “Políticas de juventud”.

[viii] Beretta, “Políticas de juventudes”.

[ix] Joaquín Adelantado et al., “Las relaciones entre estructura y políticas sociales: una propuesta teórica” [The relationship between social structure and policies: a theoretical proposal], Revista Mexicana de Sociología 60, no. 3 (1998): 131–58.

[x] Pedro Núñez and Diego Beretta, “Las políticas de juventudes” [Youth policies], in Itinerarios del bienestar en espacios subnacionales. La política social en la ciudad de Santa Fe (1983–2016) [Pathways to well-being in subnational spaces. Social policy in the city of Santa Fe (1983–2016)], edited by Daniela Soldano (Santa Fe: Ediciones UNL, 2021), 249–80.

[xi] Author interview with Marielle Palau, online, 2025.

[xii] Author interview with Diego Beretta, online, 2025.

[xiii] André Noël Roth-Deubel, “Reseña del libro: ‘Las políticas públicas de juventud en Colombia durante el período 1997–2011’” [Book review: “Public youth policies in Colombia during the period 1997–2011”], Eleuthera 23, no. 2 (2021): 323–34, https://doi.org/10.17151/eleu.2021.23.2.16.

[xiv] João Dionísio, Maria João Hortas, and Joana Campos, “Jovens construtores da cidade: cidadania e participação no município do Funchal” [Young city builders: citizenship and participation in the municipality of Funchal], Da Investigação às Práticas 12, no. 2 (2022): 146–73, https://doi.org/10.25757/invep.v12i2.325.

[xv] Daiana A. Monti, “Juventudes de clases populares y covid-19: vida cotidiana y desigualdades” [Working-class youth and Covid-19: everyday life and inequalities], Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud 21, no. 3 (2023): 196–219, https://doi.org/10.11600/rlcsnj.21.3.5960.

[xvi] Author interview with Agustina Corica, online, 2025.

[xvii] Author interview with Marielle Palau, online, 2025.

[xviii] Luis P. Bresciani, Maria C. Corrochano, and Maria E. R. Nogueira, “Mapa de políticas públicas para a juventude e o trabalho na cidade de São Paulo: uma perspectiva contemporânea” [Map of public policies for youth and work in the city of São Paulo: a contemporary perspective], Cadernos Gestão Pública e Cidadania 28 (2023): e84763, https://doi.org/10.12660/cgpc.v28.84763.

[xix] Author interview with Olga Caballero, online, 2025.

[xx] Bresciani et al., “Mapa de políticas”.