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

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.