Youth civic engagement in the Global South in a time of growing political fragmentation

This paper draws on the concept of ‘evolving capacities’ to elucidate how young people’s networks of relationships within their wider socioecological environments, including online, constrain or enable their emergent citizenship in the global South. This analytical framework is applied to case studies from a decade of longitudinal mixed methods research in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Jordan by the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) programme to explore youth civic engagement dynamics. The paper shows how a multi-level intersectional analysis of young people’s evolving political capacities - conceiving of political participation and civic engagement as shaped by a nexus of diverse socioecological influences that evolve over adolescence into early adulthood - can offer novel insights into supporting youth civic participation amid political fragmentation.