Stephan Dahmen

The Theoretical Orthodoxy of Children’s and Youth Agency and Its Contradictions: Moving from Normative Thresholds to a Situated Assessment of Children’s and Youth Lives

Recent developments within the discussion on children’s rights and in the new sociology of childhood come with a strong focus on children’s agency. They stress their status as a social and political actor, emphasise the need to view children as “beings” rather than “becomings” and highlight children’s autonomy and individuality. This chapter argues that the recent “theoretical orthodoxy” of children’s autonomy may purport an overly optimistic view on children’s agency and neglects inequalities within the space of childhood and youth. It describes the capability approach as a more appropriate approach for analysing inequalities within the space of youth and childhood. It overcomes some of the blind spots described. Particularly, it suggests that the capability approach provides an adequate link between prescriptive treaties (like the UNCRC) and descriptive-analytic approaches (like the sociology of childhood and youth). Based on a research project on transitions from school to work, the article reviews the role of welfare State institutions for the construction of children as social policy objects and for their access to citizenship rights, and analyses differences within the experience of youth that can easily be overlooked by a strong focus on children’s agency. The capability approach is used to develop a tentative framework for a situated assessment of children’s and youth lives. The chapter shortly reviews possible venues of childhood and youth research inspired by the capability approach.

Analysing inequality and disadvantage from a capability perspective: Fighting Inequality Through Capability Oriented Policy

The concept of (in-)equality is ambivalent and can be interpreted in a great variety of ways. As Sen has pointed out, all political and moral traditions since the Enlightenment are based on a conception of ‘equality of something’. Even if equality is deeply enshrined in the discourse on modernity and intimately bound with the historical development of democracy, this ‘something’ varies from an author to another one, involving different conceptions of justice. Public action against inequalities is necessarily based on (implicit and explicit) judgements about existing disparities, some of them being assessed as illegitimate and therefore requiring a corrective intervention, other ones not. We argue that the question ‘Equality of what?’ (Sen 1979) is of central importance, as it also indicates what should be equalized and what can remain unequal. What inequalities require public intervention and why? Who decides about this and who is not involved in this identification of unacceptable inequalities? Our contribution aims at describing how a capability perspective on social inequalities allows tackling the complex interaction between inequalities, democracy and barriers to participation. Sections 1 to 4 emphasize the complexity of the issue of (in-) equality and the various conceptions in this field. Section 5 shows to what extent participation can make a difference when identifying and tackling inequalities. Section 6 concludes.