ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the nature and significance of the neoliberal embrace of youth by examining precisely these substantive questions. It examines how the neoliberal model of youth that describes in the chapter has spread across the world through the direct agency of a dense network of governmental, private sector and nongovernmental organizations, and how this model has become hegemonic, even as it is often contested locally by individual young people and others. For the positive youth development movement also represents a shift in dominant conceptualizations of youth that has been driven, in large part, by neoliberal ideology and human capital theory. The International Youth Foundation (IYF), which has been one of the most prominent proponents of positive youth development globally, is essentially a global marketing organization for some of the world's largest and wealthiest corporations.
