A relational capabilitarian approach for wellbeing livelihoods: Reframing and making alternative education, skills, and work for young people

Education and skills agendas in global education policy and discourse focus on skills that young people need to be able to work and participate in society. However, societal structures and relations can impede the development of valued knowledge and skills, resulting in many young people being underemployed or working in indecent conditions. To better understand how education and skills can create wellbeing livelihoods, we need to reframe the binaries that permeate education and skills policies and practices and analyse the different power relations within young people’s lives. A relational capabilitarian approach focuses on how individuals constitute their being/becoming in relation to social, economic, and environmental structures (DeJaeghere, 2020; Deneulin, 2014; Owens et al., 2022; Smith & Seward, 2009). It considers how young people’s aspirational and agentic capacities and wellbeing are created in and through their environments, in relation to inequities and opportunities for education and work. This approach asks questions to examine and explain how young people generate and change power relations in their environments. Education is an important material and social environment that shapes young people’s subjectivities, and it is a space for young people to consider and enact what they value for their lives and livelihoods. A relational capabilitarian approach reframes how we think about education, skills, and work to see young people as reshaping their education within their aspirational and agentic present and future selves.