From aspiration to action: poverty, organised violence, and the structural conditions of aspirational agency in Bonteheuwel, South Africa

Abstract

Young people in Bonteheuwel, a township on Cape Town's Cape Flats, articulate ambitious aspirations yet pursue these commitments within conditions of entrenched poverty, institutional fragility and organised gang violence. Building on the capability approach and critiques of its underdeveloped account of capability formation, this paper conceptualises aspirations as aspirational agency: the bounded capacity to form, sustain, revise and pursue future-oriented commitments under structural constraint, and introduces aspirational capacity as the structural, psychosocial and relational conditions that make such commitment possible. It proposes the Aspiration-Capability Lens (ACL) as a processual framework tracing how constraints accumulate across the opportunity-resource field, aspirational capacity, aspiration formation, pathway engagement and pathway outcomes. Drawing on a qualitative case study combining key-informant interviews, focus groups and narrative interviews with young people, the findings show that while young people aspire ambitiously, poverty, organised violence and institutional thinning systematically erode the conditions on which those aspirations depend, contracting what aspirational agency can coherently pursue across time. The paper contributes empirically to Global South capability scholarship by demonstrating how organised violence reshapes the institutional conditions through which aspirations become real freedoms, and conceptually by specifying aspirational capacity and aspirational agency as processual components of capability conversion in violent, impoverished settings.