A global foreclosure of youth futures: Austerity as a shared process

Abstract

This response to Santiago del Río et al.’s (2025) exploration of youth precarity in Europe contextualises their findings within broader international dynamics. I highlight how youth precarity is showing signs of convergence acorss low- to high-income countries, despite diverse historical, cultural, and economic contexts. Internationally, austerity can be understood as a ‘shared process’ which is undermining state capacity and intensifying the barriers to stable adulthood, thus reshaping young people's life courses,. Research from Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia demonstrates how austerity and other disruptive processes have recalibrated young people's expectations of the state and their aspirations for themselves. Young people's aspirations for stability face the structural constraints of limited formal employment and fraying social protection. In this context, volunteering, savings, and informal strategies often become coping mechanisms. Given the weakened state functions in many contexts, I warn of a generational normalisation of inadequate public provision. In response, greater investment in state-led support systems is urgently needed to reverse generational scarring and establish decent opportunities for young people as a new norm. Further, a new agenda of international comparative research into youth precarity could identify commonalities and divergences in the challenges faced by young people around the world to provide a holistic overview.

Converging youth precarity

The roads to stability are increasingly blocked, the paths to precarity are fluid and geographically contingent. (del Río et al., 2025)

As a scholar of both austerity policies and youth livelihoods, I was intrigued when Santiago del Río et al.’s (2025) paper on austere life courses landed on my desk. The paper incisively draws together changes to care, the family, public spending, housing and employment to highlight the struggles that many young Europeans face in building their ‘adult’ lives. On reading, I was reminded of my young, mainly British students, questioning their own uncertain employment and housing futures, as well as of the precarious livelihoods of young people I’ve recently worked with in Indonesia, Nepal, and Uganda (Barford et al., 2024b; Mugeere et al., 2021). This converging (though far from identical) precarity amongst some of the most and least privileged young people in the world is notable.

Despite diverging national incomes, cultural diversity, and historical and geographical specificities, young people's experiences are shaped by similar processes and concrete universals (after Robinson, 2016). Common processes include changes such as austerity, climate change and pandemics; universals, such as the state and the private sector, vary in their details but exist almost everywhere (ibid.). del Río et al. emphasise key shifts which are shaping youth futures in Europe, shifts which have parallels in the so-called Global South, and are arguably generating globally converging trends for many young people. The widespread foreclosure of young people's futures could be described as a ‘levelling down’, whereby the centroid for convergence is growing precarity with insufficient state support.

del Río et al. issue an austerity wakeup call to the rich world by showing the damage this is causing to younger generations. Guided by the thinking of Robinson (2016), I now turn to some broad international parallels between what is happening in Europe and global trends. While youth experiences are not the same, I highlight broad similarities between lower and higher income countries which may otherwise be overlooked given the tendency to analyse within, and not between, national income groups. I conclude by arguing that despite the state being weakened by austerity, we should nevertheless maintain high expectations of the state as a crucial institution for enabling young people to build their futures.

Common processes: Austerity seeps between countries

Austerity is international and widespread, as a policy approach shared by low- to high-income countries. In 2021, austerity policies impacted 6.3 million people, which is over 80% of the world population (Ortiz and Cummings, 2022). Some of the most common targets for austerity policies have been social protection, public-sector wage bills, subsidies, privatisation, and labour flexibilisation (ibid.). Despite some moments of stimulus spending in the wake of major shocks such as the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, the austerity policies of the 2020s were layered onto already depleted budgets (ibid.). Further back still, the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s had also reduced public spending, privatised state amenities, and shrunk public services – resulting in ‘stagnating income and rising poverty in many countries, scarring generations across the world’ (Oxfam, 2013: 4).

Austerity has been an international policy logic for a long time – presented as a ‘shared sacrifice’ and the only rational and responsible policy option (Gray and Barford, 2018; Major, 2014). The prominence of austerity policies can be attributed to what Aaron Major (2014) calls the transnationalisation of monetary authority – whereby central bankers and finance ministers have become entwined in neoliberal transnational and intergovernmental financial institutions. Another mechanism by which austerity spreads internationally is through changes to development spending. A striking example of this is how in January 2025 President Trump issued an executive order to freeze foreign aid for 90 days. This resulted in the termination of jobs for USAID, UN and NGO workers (and probably others too), and the shrinking of health, conflict, and education interventions in many countries (Harter, 2025). Austerity has been repeatedly shown to reconfigure the state, the economy, and infrastructure – thus altering the context in which young people seek to build their lives (Apostolopoulou and Liodaki, 2025; Barford, 2023). As austerity becomes more deeply established, this is likely to shape generational expectations of what one's government can and should do.

Shared experiences: The search for stability

With government jobs, state services and public amenities compromised by successive waves of austerity policies, the foundations are set for youth precarity. del Río et al. describe for Europe, how ‘the once-expected markers of adulthood (financial, social and housing independence), as prescribed by post-war, and still present in post-Fordist narratives and people's aspirations, have become largely unattainable’ (2025). Similar youth aspirations exist in lower-income countries. These aspirations are serious and ambitious, including for instance owning a business, higher education, volunteering, leadership roles, and caring for their families (Barford et al., 2021). Yet opportunities to reach these ambitions are elusive, as daily difficulties and acute disruptions all too readily foreclose possibilities.

Recent trends across seven sub-Saharan African countries show how the COVID-19 pandemic led to worse labour market conditions for young people. The number of young people Not in Education Employment or Training increased significantly, particularly impacting young people with disabilities and young women (O’Higgins et al., 2023b). Elsewhere, pandemic lockdowns and the need to care for ailing dependents in Indonesia and Nepal, combined with insufficient access to social protection, led some young people to take on new debts or risky work to feed their families (Barford et al., 2024b). These disruptions can have lasting, and generationally scarring impacts, which require policy attention and investment to reverse (O’Higgins et al., 2023a).

Without abundant opportunities for formal work, and without clear pathways to ‘adulthood’, it is striking to observe how young people in lower-income countries endeavour to foster stability for themselves. For instance, when young people from across South Asia and Africa were asked about what they would want from financial services, they expressed a wariness about the risks of taking a loan, and a preference for the stability-enhancing financial tools of savings accounts and insurance (Shankland et al., 2022). Without many formal employment opportunities available, volunteering has become one pathway to gain experience, build networks, keep busy, and sometimes earn a small stipend – while also filling some of the gaps in service provision left by an austere state (Barford et al., 2024a).

Reinforcing the concrete of universals

del Río et al. describe how ‘austerity seeps into all aspects of everyday life in enduring ways, reshaping life-course norms, temporalities, dreams and expectations’ (2025). This can take many forms, one of which is the slow shifting of what the state is, does, and is expected to do. For Robinson (2016), the state and private sector are universals, however, austerity and other dynamics are altering their form. One longer-term concern here is that as young people grow up they may learn not to expect a good state education, they perhaps normalise how people's needs may go unmet, or come to believe that goods and services are best accessed in an individualistic and privatised manner. As austerity undercuts the functioning of the state, will subsequent generations never learn what a state could provide?

Another concrete universal identified by Robinson is the private sector. Given its size, grip, employment capacity, and influence, the private sector cannot be ignored. However much attention is paid to what doesn’t work. The rise of the private sector in housing provision is often associated with higher rents for worse living conditions (del Río et al., 2025), while private gentrification of once-public infrastructure in Greece has been seen to prioritise profits over the needs of neighbourhoods and communities (Apostolopoulou and Liodaki, 2025). More widely, moves towards enhancing business responsibility often need to bring business benefits – as an internal justification for such activities. Recognising the benefits of business responsibility, some corporates and investors are committing to paying living wages including in their supply chains – creating better work while bringing reputational, operational and supply chain benefits (Barford et al., 2025). Though sometimes an uneasy alliance, reversing the foreclosure of youth futures demands that the role of the private sector is well thought out and articulated in relation to societal well-being.

The widespread trend towards the foreclosure of youth futures starkly contrasts with the internationally agreed ambitions for young people, crystallised in the only youth-specific Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target: to reduce the number of young people Not in Education Employment or Training. Progress towards SDG target 8.6 is slow (Cieslik et al., 2022; del Río et al., 2025). As well as reinforcing the concrete universals of the state and private sector and their capacity to respond to disruptive processes, it is important to engage young people themselves in international comparative research to understand their circumstances, choices, and aspirations to lift precarity and build pathways to more secure futures (Proefke and Barford, 2023).