Claim It in Bahia: Youth Participation in Community-Based Research and Development

Thirty years after the adoption of the Child and Adolescent Act and a decade after the Youth Statute came into force in Brazil, youth policies still fail to meet young people’s needs and secure their rights. This work, featured in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice, edited by Corey Dolgon and published in October 2024, focuses on the organization of youth mobilizers and their interactions with institutions in the backlands of Bahia, Brazil, to exercise their right to participation and advocate for education for rural sustainable development. By exploring how young people engage in decision-making processes, the work sheds light on partnership-building and the challenges of dismantling institutional systems that have historically marginalized them. By arguing that policy outcomes rarely address youth's real demands if it does not directly engage with them, this work explores the initiative of mobilized youth to understand the formation of a new generation of activists for social justice. It finds that beyond the legal framework, which has been a key mechanism for protecting young people's rights, participation and civic engagement in the rural areas of Bahia will primarily happen through territorial and identity affirmation.