Seeking to challenge the participation agenda: youth participation in policy making in Tanzania

This paper explores the different actors, relations, power dynamics and discourses that have informed the participatory process for the youth in Tanzania regarding policy making. I ex-amine the different practices and experiences youth representatives have encountered while taking part in the participation process in relation to what the government announces. I argue that the participatory process is driven by a dominating discourse by the government that seeks to control and manage the youth and not empower them for meaningful participation. The youth also produce and reproduce the different rationalities and strategies that the gov-ernment use to manage the youth. The youth however have at the same time used their agency to seek transformative change and invoke strategies that will change perception. With the constant informing and reforming between theory and practice, while these strategies are inherently informing each other, the power dynamics are still heavily favouring the govern-ment and building an arsenal of information and data could be a better way to endure mean-ingful participation in the future.