Rural Youth’s Capacity to Aspire: What Role for Local Government Actions?

ABSTRACT

The capacity to aspire is understood as the capacity to identify and navigate pathways to realise personal ideas of the good life. The constrained capacity to aspire of poor people inhibits their ability to change their circumstances. The questions at the heart of this paper are whether local government plays a role in the development of this capacity and how. We examined these questions through interviews with over 50 young people in a rural municipality in Colombia, where particular development-related strategies are implemented, and found that local government can strengthen the capacity to aspire by creating spaces of participation and assisting access to higher education. However, corruption, unsustainability, discontinuity of programmes, and the disregard of youth preferences constitute hindrances to the capacity to aspire that originate from government action as well. This discussion is developed around the notions of conversion factors, practical reasoning, terms of recognition, and human agency. The paper concludes that the capacity to aspire can be developed by including youth voices in policy planning, which would initiate new levels of interaction with the government that could further change the terms of recognition, and by adopting a political discourse that takes the capacity to aspire seriously.

KEYWORDS:

• Capacity to aspire
• Rural youth
• Local government
• Terms of recognition
• Practical reasoning
• Agency

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank those Suaneros who participated in the focus groups and interviews. The support from Universidad del Norte and the University of Antwerp was of great value for the development of the research and this is gratefully acknowledged. The findings presented in this paper belong to the authors; they do not necessarily reflect the views of Universidad del Norte or the University of Antwerp.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 D. Molina, Interview, 30 June 2017.

2 Individual and group interviews were conducted in Spanish. Fragments presented in the article have been translated into English.

3 The substantive freedom one has to choose a life one has reason to value (Sen 1999).

4 What a person manages to do or to be in relation to others (Walker 2018), or “an active realization of one or more capabilities” (Nussbaum 2011, 24–25).

5 Young female, 20 years old, entrepreneur, pregnant.

6 Young female, 26 years old, university student, mother.

7 Young male, 23 years old, higher education student.

8 Young female, 20 years old, high school student.

9 20 years old, unemployed.

10 28 years old, unemployed.

11 26 years old, cleaner, mother.

12 20 years old, entrepreneur.

13 Motocarro and bicicoche are light delivery vans that work by the propulsion of a motorcycle or bicycle.

14 Young male, 26 years old, entrepreneur, father.

15 Capital city of the Atlántico department.

16 Young male, 22 years old, technician.

17 21 years old, technician in construction.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura López-Muñoz

Laura López-Muñoz is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Universidad del Norte, Colombia. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and a Master of Science’s degree in Governance and Development.

Bert Ingelaere

Bert Ingelaere is a lecturer in the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, Belgium. He holds a PhD in Development Studies, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fund for Scientific Research—Flanders (FWO) and the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence (OCV), Yale University. He is the co-editor of Genocide, Risk and Resilience, and author of Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts.