International governmental organisations and global youth unemployment: the normative and ideational foundations of policy discourses

Abstract

This article compares policy discourses concerning youth unemployment of seven international governmental organisations (IGOs). We classify the discourses according to broadly neoliberal and social democratic positions across labour market and social welfare domains, regarding causes of and responses to youth unemployment. We relate evidence of hybrids and shifts in IGOs’ discourses to wider institutional contexts of global social policy and to debates about IGO responses to the global financial crisis. Our analysis addresses a neglected sphere of global social policy and youth policy research and opens a window on the contested politics of the determination of a new policy field.