Do youth policies matter? National and local youth policies as contexts of youth participation

The results of the Partispace project shades light on a large variety of youth participation initiatives across the studied countries. This diversity could be characterized through several breaking lines: conformist versus deviant, addressing a general public (or the world) versus concerned with themselves (see above), regular versus episodic, closed versus accessible, requiring commitment and skills or not... (Walther, 2018). The present chapter aims at explaining this variety, trying to anwer the following question: To what extent and how does the diversity of local youth participation initiatives depends on the local and national youth policies in which they are embedded?