This conceptual paper makes the proposition that human capital development initiatives can enhance the abilities of adults when they work through Y-AP to facilitate youth participation. The development of adult allies’ skills in Youth-Adult Partnerships (Y-AP) is essential to create an inclusive, effective, and culturally sensitive collaborative environment for youth participation. Research shows that the skill set development of adults also reduces practices associated with adultism which prevents them from positively working through Y-AP to facilitate youth participation. The particular interest of this paper is to extend knowledge accrual, and thus fill knowledge gaps on how Adult Allies the Y-AP approach outside the United States of America where the conceptual approach was conceived. This interest is motivated by propositions forwarded in previously published research papers on the application of Y-AP in Malaysia that suggest that there is limited non-Western research, which also takes into account the influences of cultural context. Recent studies indicated that power-distance relationships in the cultural context of Asia between adult allies and youth may hamper the positive application of the Y-AP approach for positive youth development.
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