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Paper short abstract

Empirical scholarship examining how youth engage with urban governance institutions remains limited, particularly in Nepal. This paper addresses this gap by investigating urban governance of Dharan, Nepal--a country comparatively under-researched in urban and youth studies in South Asia.

Paper long abstract

Youth participation in local development and decision-making processes is widely recognized as a critical condition for fostering sustainable, inclusive, and resilient urban futures, as emphasized in the Sustainable Development Goals and youth policy frameworks across the Global South. Young people contribute distinctive capacities to governance through innovative ideas, plural perspectives, and alternative modes of civic engagement, frequently driving grassroots activism and social movements that seek to enhance accountability, social justice, and inclusivity in urban contexts. Despite this normative recognition, empirical scholarship examining how youth engage with urban governance institutions remains limited, particularly in South Asia. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on Nepal, a country comparatively under-researched in urban and youth studies in South Asia. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Dharan, a mid-sized city in eastern Nepal, the study examines how young people experience and negotiate participation within local urban governance institutions, the extent to which community-level planning practices enable or constrain meaningful youth engagement, and the alternative forms of mobilization through which youth seek to influence urban development trajectories. The findings demonstrate that while Nepal’s local governance frameworks formally endorse inclusive participation, young people face significant structural and institutional barriers to effective involvement. Municipal decision-making spaces remain dominated by adults, senior citizens, and established political actors however young people actively contest these exclusions by engaging through non-traditional and informal avenues, including digital advocacy networks, neighborhood-based volunteer initiatives, creative and cultural collectives, and issue-specific campaigns addressing urban service delivery, environmental degradation, pedestrian safety, and public space governance.