Paper short abstract:

Drawing from the perspectives of young people in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, this paper critically reflects on different interpretations of youth agency in educational settings and what these may tell us about agency in relation to youths’ wider capability sets in crisis-affected contexts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically reflects on different interpretations of the idea of youth agency in educational settings. Drawing from the perspectives of young people involved in NGO education projects in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, through participatory field work conducted in 2023, the paper explores similarities and differences between youths’ interpretations of agency within and across the three countries and considers what different interpretations may tell us about agency in relation to youths’ wider capability sets in crisis-affected contexts. Using the capability approach as the theoretical framework and drawing on concepts of agency as understood by Sen (1999, 2002, 2009) and later elaborated on by Crocker (2018, 2019), the paper aims to generate culturally and locally situated information about youth agency that is intended to be useful for youth, their communities, national processes for social inclusion, and international organizations and NGOs implementing education projects with aims of developing youth agency in the region.

Global policy dialogues are increasingly calling on youth to act as ‘agents of change’ in development (GPE, 2022; UN, 2018) and this terminology is increasingly featuring in Central American education initiatives that aim to equip youth with knowledge and skills to effect positive change in their communities (Plan International, 2022; UN, 2021; USAID, 2022b). While these global commitments are creating new opportunities for global and local education stakeholders to engage with youth, they are also raising some questions around expectations, and how to interpret and balance global strategies to enhance agency in one domain that may reduce well-being or increase vulnerability in another (Khader 2012, 2020). What agency looks like to a Honduran boy and Guatemalan girl may differ, especially if the two are facing different issues of violence, poverty, gender discrimination and other intersecting inequalities, as distilled to be some of the key analysts of these processes (Crenshaw 1991; Kabeer 2020).

By analyzing youths’ responses in focus group discussions and artwork produced during participatory fieldwork, this paper traces how 36 young people living in peri-urban communities in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, interpret and navigate agency in relation to their environments, and how they understand what it means to be an ‘agent of change’. Key themes emerging from the analysis highlight how significant relations in the local environment are to a sense of agency. It also distils a number of points of silence, in which agency is opaque, raising issues for refining theorization in this area.