Authors: Mustapha El Mnasfi ^1,2,3

• 1 Université Moulay Ismail
• 2 Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans
• 3 جامعة مولاي إسماعيل = Université Moulay Ismaïl

This article deals with youth councils, one of the mechanisms for participatory democracy established in Morocco. Their objective is to facilitate the full and active participation of young people in public policy design and implementation. This article specifically addresses the use made by different types of local actors of this facility. How do youth councils impact youth who are participating in these structures? How do youth manage to influence local policies? Those are the two main questions that we will try to answer in this paper. The link between youth and public policy is linked to the use made by young people of the public participation mechanism. In this sense, it is critical to try to understand how actors who openly challenge one or more aspect of the public intervention end up becoming actors themselves within that public policy. We will try to demonstrate, from the experience of a youth council established in the city of Ouarzazate, that young people challenging public interventions end up accepting the precise interventions they vehemently opposed once they start joining the formal participatory structures. This research is based on the collection of qualitative data from semidirect interviews with members of the national coalition of youth councils, with young people organized around the local youth council and with local elected officials in Ouarzazate. Field surveys show that young people organized around a socalledparticipatory mechanism can ensure their entry into local public action, but as a result, adopt a position at the opposite of what it originally was. This participatory mechanism manages to brings young people closer to government representatives and, as a result, impacts on their demands. The youth council’s process thus helps to mediate the approval of the official state discourse by young people who previously challenged local public action.