The Political Role of Civil Society in the Policy Field of Youth Unemployment and Precarious Working Conditions

Civil society organizations (CSOs) operating in the field of youth unemployment and precarious working conditions promote a wide offer of political activities that range from providing information and expertise during the process of policy design and implementation to engaging in more confrontational actions such as calling for collective mobilization. The development and use of such a breadth of activities is dependent upon the specific political-institutional setting in which they operate. In particular, different unemployment regimes, namely those contexts within which unemployment and precarious work are tackled with diverse policy tools, provide different incentives to CSOs activity. For example, the use of activation policies, which aim at improving people’s employability through engaging them in training, formation, or other skills improvement, have fostered the development of CSOs specializing in service delivery in the field of education and training (Handler 2003; Defourny and Nyssens 2010). Similarly, a change in the configuration of leading actors in labor policy such as trade unions has facilitated the mobilization of CSOs to protest about unemployment (Baglioni et al. 2008). Thus, the action repertoire of societal actors is closely related to the characteristics of the institutional settings in which it develops.