Business, as usual: the policy priorities of the World Bank's discourses on youth unemployment, and the global financial crisis

Abstract

International governmental organisations (IGO) are an active presence in youth unemployment policy. This article undertakes a detailed analysis of the formative role of one IGO -the World Bank (WB) -in the framing of policy in this issue area. It charts the WB's emergence as a powerful political actor in this policy field and identifies the ideational content of its discourses. Four principal themes are identified: skills deficits; the effects of employment regulation and social protection on youth labour markets; the 'demographication' of explanations for burgeoning youth unemployment; and connections between youth unemployment, criminal activity and social disorder. The discussion highlights significant evidence of neoliberal continuity and reinvention in WB discourses as its normative and ideational frameworks are extended to new terrains of analysis in ways that infer direct links between youth unemployment, social protection and social cohesion

Young people and UK labour market policy: A critique of ‘employability’ as a tool for understanding youth unemployment

“…The preceding section has drawn attention to the way in which an increasingly narrow conception of employability has underpinned governmental policies towards urban youth unemployment and has served to legitimate welfare reforms and increasing conditionality. This very same concept also serves as an explanation for high levels of youth unemployment giving rise to a supply-side consensus which is increasingly globalised and perpetuated by international governmental organisations (Fergusson and Yeates, 2013, 2014). In this section we firstly reflect on the changing policy and governance function of employability as applied to urban youth unemployment and, secondly, on the theoretical concept of youth transitions as a framework for understanding youth unemployment.…”

“…In the 1980s, the rhetoric of the New Right in the UK ‘transmuted social issues like unemployment into moral problems’ and the focus shifted to an ‘intensification of the tendency to personalize unemployment’ (Cole, 2008: 32). This phenomenon is also evident across Western neoliberal societies (Fraser and Gordon, 1994; Peck, 2001; Wacquant, 2008) and is central to an emergent global youth unemployment discourse (Fergusson and Yeates, 2013, 2014). A key assumption underpinning labour market policy in the UK (and beyond) since the 1980s, then, is the notion that large sections of the workless population lack the values and behaviours deemed necessary to fulfil the societal obligation of work.…”

“…Whilst the UK has long been highlighted as an example of policy transfer of American policy paradigms around workfare (Daguerre, 2004), there are signs of ‘emerging tendencies’ towards more disciplinary forms of US-style workfare across other Western Europe states too (Brodkin and Larsen, 2013: 43) and often targeting the most marginalised sections of urban societies (van Baar, 2012). Thus, on a higher level, alongside the emergence of a global youth unemployment discourse (Fergusson and Yeates, 2013, 2014) is an international shift in terms of the punitive management of ‘problematic’ populations.…”

Economic Growth, Youth Unemployment and Political and Social Instability: A Study of Policies and Outcomes in Post-Arab Spring Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Tunisia

“…A network of international NGOs emerged to fulfill many of the core functions that the states had been responsible for, thereby further weakening state capacity and authority. Ultimately, state-guaranteed employment was dropped as governmental policy, causing youth unemployment to reach the crisis level that eventually triggered the Arab Spring protests (Fergusson and Yeates 2013;El-Said and Harrigan 2014;Mossallem 2015).…”

“…For a long time, the World Bank and the IMF have been active players in the macroeconomic policymaking of these countries through the conditions placed on the receipt of grants and loans sanctioned by these institutions. In this study, the influence of the IMF on pre-and post-Arab Spring policy has been of particular interest to us (e.g., Stiglitz 2002;Fergusson and Yeates 2013;El-Said and Harrigan 2014;Mossallem 2015).…”