The Citizen Lab in Berlin in February 2024 was a two-day workshop on
“Aspirations, Capabilities and Transformative Institutions”. This workshop brought
together researchers from different disciplines, some of whom are part of the
Involve network, to explore how the capacity to aspire relates to human
development, defined by Amartya Sen as the expansion of people’s real freedom
to live the kind of life they have reason to value (Sen 1999, 18).
During two days, we discussed the theoretical, empirical and methodological implications of the capacity to aspire and how it relates to the capability to aspire. In the framework of the Involve project that analyses the role of social policies and services in promoting trust and democratic participation, these concepts help to address the relation between welfare institutions and the empowerment of vulnerable people. Some of the presentations were more theoretical in scope and aimed to discuss
the reciprocal contributions of the work of Amartya Sen and Arjun Appadurai,
while others focused on concrete social policies, drawing on empirical research
into education, health and immigration policies. In these presentations, the notion
of the « collective » took different meanings that we propose to explore by a short
report on each presentation.
Various contributions to the workshop addressed the role of the social context as
hindering or fostering the formation of aspirations. Ortrud Lessmann reminded us
that, according to Appadurai, aspirations do not depend just on individuals’
preferences and emotions, but on the capacity to aspire that is collectively and
culturally shaped, and that provides an ethical horizon for the development of
people’s capabilities.
Caroline Hart finds in Bourdieu’s work the tools for an understanding of why some
aspirations are possible to achieve and others are not, how structural forces and agency enter in dialogue to foster or hinder aspirations and their achievement.
Evelyne Baillergeau drew on the work of Bourdieu but she invites Alfred Schutz in the
discussion, to refine the conceptual apparatus for theorizing the future. She underlined that aspiration is part of the “archive of experience”, i.e. the set of resources available to individuals in relation to the social conditions of their own lives, from which they produce knowledge about the world and assess the feasibility of their plans.
By comparing aspirations with what Dewey calls « ends in view », Bénédicte Zimmermann emphasised the extent to which aspirations depend on agency (they are agentic) but are also a prerequisite for it, and as such are agentive. To explore this pivotal role of aspirations, she invited us to develop means for studying the feedback loop between situated agency, aspirations and capabilities.
The environment in which experience is formed, which is at the heart of pragmatist
thinking, is crystallised in particular by institutions and collective organisations,
which can be understood as a means of developing people’s capacity to aspire.
Some contributions studied how public policies, which by the way of norms set
the horizon for individual and collective practices, can constitute resources or, on
the contrary, constraints in the formation of aspirations.
Through a meticulous survey of undocumented migrants who were regularized
through a specific policy in Geneva, Liana Consoli explored whether and how
institutional change can induce a change in migrants’ capability to aspire and what
temporal dynamic of aspirations it shapes.
Josiane Vero and Camille Stephanus showed that in France, in a context where
public policies emphasise the freedom to choose one’s professional future, lowskilled employees have very few public resources at their disposal to make their
professional retraining choices heard, in the face of employment policies that give
priority to adapting employees to the needs of the labour market.
By producing rich data on the complex interrelationship between opportunities and
the way in which they collectively and individually influence the imagination of young
people entering university with regard to their future, Melanie Walker developed the
concept of reparation, which places aspirations at the intersection of a past that traps young people in oppressive relationships, a present in which they act and a future that they dream of and work towards. This notion of « reparation » can play a key role in the process of recognising the collective nature of agency.
Individual aspirations are in this case fed by collective aspirations, which in turn develop an environment conducive to the realisation of those aspirations, a process captured by the notion of a retroactive loop between agency and aspirations advanced by Bénédicte Zimmermann. If collective institutions and organisations play a key role in transforming social contexts, how can they be reinvented in ways that contribute to developing the capacity to aspire ? What role should institutions play in a structural context of uncertainty? From this perspective, the « collective » becomes a goal that requires action as well as research, to improve its theoretical, empirical and political understanding.
By looking at the context of healthcare services during the Covid pandemic in
Northern Italy, Lavinia Bifulco examined a case where the individual and collective
experience of uncertainty gave way to the imagination of new institutions. She
analysed the effects of a policy implemented at the micro level and the
transformations it allowed in terms of capacity. Healthcare services were also
discussed by Caroline Hart, who, after many years scrutinizing school systems
and the aspirations politics meant to increase the number of students going on to
higher education, is leading action-research in NHS in England.
Finally, by drawing on the capability approach, Jean-Michel Bonvin and
Francesco Laruffa proposed a new horizon for social policies that would aim to
develop people’s capability to aspire rather than adapting them to the economic
imperatives of capitalism as it is the case in current welfare policies. Against this
background, they proposed to conceive transformative institutions as being able
to nourish aspirations and bring back vulnerable people’s voice into the democratic
debate. Participatory action research would then take on its full meaning to develop
aspirations and collective agency for more participative and inclusive public policies, by making vulnerable people actors and judges in the debates about how institutions should be framed and should work
Olivia Vieujean, Centre Georg Simmel, EHESS, France