Introduction

Underpinning this special issue is our unease about the ways in which children and youth are included in much development literature. The incorporation of the young in theories and practices of development can too often be characterised as an ‘absent presence’, despite some notable exceptions (for example, Goddard and White, 1982; Katz, 2004; Jeffrey, 2010; Camfield, 2011). The young are evidently present as targets of development interventions, and often feature prominently on the covers of development reports and textbooks. Ideologies and practices of development are also frequently justified or critiqued in the name of young people as the ‘next generation’ or ‘the future’. Children and youth are, further, clearly present as subfields within wider development concerns such as child labour, child protection, youth unemployment and adolescent sexuality.Footnote 1 Yet, generational perspectives pertaining to young people in contexts of development remain too often absent, despite young people’s prominent presence in development practice and literature.

In this introductory article, we outline an analytical approach that we have termed ‘generationing’ development. Mayall (2002, p. 27) described ‘generationing’ as ‘the relational process whereby people come to be known as children, and whereby children and childhood acquire certain characteristics, linked to local contexts, and changing as the factors brought to bear change’. In this special issue, we take Mayall’s analytical project a step further by distinguishing between concepts of age and generational dynamics and by teasing out how these relate to and inform our understanding of development. Thereby, we seek to contribute to a better conceptualisation of the interface between development studies and children and youth studies. These two areas of theory and practice have over the past decades developed too much in isolation from one another despite the obvious interconnections.

Let us elaborate with a brief example from Thailand. In recent decades, Thailand’s development trajectory has been characterised by rapid expansion of its service and manufacturing sectors. Several authors (for example, Mills, 1999; Esara, 2004) have noted that the expanding neo-liberal labour market has provided new employment opportunities for the young in particular, and that young people’s entry into urban wage labour is closely tied to their aspirations for modernity. Yet in the development literature, young people’s entry into the neo-liberal labour market is studied mostly by detailing the too often exploitative conditions under which most of these youngsters work (for example, Pearson et al, 2006). Although such publications serve an important purpose, they reduce generational perspectives to a concern about young people’s vulnerability in development. This leaves unaddressed how development transforms the opportunity structures shaping young lives and how young people renegotiate their generational position in society in such changing contexts, and in doing so re-negotiate notions of childhood and youth (see, for example, Koning, 1997; Utrata, 2011). Generational dynamics have received insufficient attention in the development literature; however, their significance often transpires from research with young people as illustrated by this quote from a male youth in a study on adolescents’ lives in the rapidly changing Thai context:

It’s very different. They [his parents] listen to everything I say now. When I didn’t earn money, it was like blowing in the wind when I talked (Soonthorndhada et al, 2005, p. 116)

The articles in this issue cover an eclectic range of topics, ranging from land tenure reform to education, and from inter-country adoption to young Palestinian refugees. Yet, all are positioned on the interface between children and youth studies and development studies. Collectively, the articles in this volume give shape to the project of ‘generationing’ development, and do so by drawing on core conceptual approaches towards development. This includes development as a programmatic intervention (Archambault), as a Foucauldian project of governmentality (Morarji), as capitalist expansion (Cheney), as an everyday concern about ‘searching for life’ (Berckmoes and White) and as an entangled social logic (Gigengack).

Relationality and Age

A relational analysis is key to the approach taken in this volume. Relationality overcomes the limitations inherent to categorising approaches, which focus on young people in an isolated fashion. Categorising approaches are widespread in children and youth studies and often circumscribe the inclusion of the young in development literature and practice. Roy Gigengack (this volume) illustrates this with the example of street children studies, which remains too often uninformed by the wider work on street ethnography and urban poverty. Yet situating young people’s lives contextually and historically is essential for a better understanding of how young lives are shaped by, and shaping, forces outside their immediate environment (Ruddick, 2003; Katz, 2004; Ansell, 2009). Categorising approaches also obfuscate how young people’s lives in many contexts are interrelated with the lives of people in other life phases (see Punch, 2002; Heinonen, 2013).

We draw on the concepts of generation and age to substantiate the relational analysis. Childhood and youth are age-related life phases. However, age is seldom given any conceptual status despite its central importance in the constitution of the subject (Laz, 1998, p. 85; Thorne, 2004, p. 404). Laz (1998, p. 86) notes that ‘age is not natural or fixed’ and ‘involves much more than the number of years since one’s birth’. Such a realisation is typically absent from the development literature, which tends to treat chronological age as a given. However, development practitioners working on children’s rights topics often struggle to work with the key tools of their trade: normative constructions of life phases that are set in the universal measure of chronological age. For example, in the following quote an anti-trafficking professional in Laos tries to make sense of the ‘case’ of a girl who entered sex work at age 17 and at age 18 facilitated the entry (and sale of virginity) of several other girls, some of minor age:

She is an agent [recruiter], but this is a child rights issue …. The girls are under eighteen? Hmmm, no. Difficult. The girls are voluntary? I am unsure. (Molland, 2012, p. 208)

Laz (1998, p. 86) argues that age is far more social than chronological because ‘it is constituted in interaction and gains its meaning in interaction in the context of larger social forces’ (see also Huijsmans, 2013). This does not imply denying the importance of chronological age, but requires us to ask how it is ‘made important in particular social and historical context and in interaction’ (Laz, 1998, p. 92, original emphasis).

In Scott’s (1998, p. 80) terminology, chronological age is a form of ‘state simplification’. It is an essential ingredient in a state’s efforts to ‘map’ its people (part of the project of legibility) and prerequisite for modern forms of government (see also Ariès, 1962, pp. 15–16). ‘Government’ is here understood in a Foucauldian manner as ‘the attempt to shape human conduct by calculated means’ through among other things ‘educating desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs’ with the overall purpose of increasing the ‘welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc’ (Li, 2007, p. 5). In this sense, development must be considered a form of government. It is especially in the period that scholars like Escobar (1995) refer to as the era of development (roughly post World War II) that chronological age is made important on a globally unprecedented scale through, for example, modern schooling, the organisation of modern health-care systems, legal systems, state and non-state bureaucratic practices, and also development targets such as the Millennium Development Goals.

Intersectionality and Temporality

In development research, the ‘variable’ of chronological age is typically employed only in relation to young people and older people. This suggests adultism because age too often remains absent from studies concerning what is often the dominant and also largest segment of the population: those considered ‘adults’. In development research, chronological age is often treated as an ‘independent variable’: ‘age is used to explain other phenomena’ without considering how age intersects with other social relations and broader social forces (Laz, 1998, p. 95).

In development practice, it is age-normativity that hinders intersectional approaches to understanding young lives. It is by virtue of chronological age that young people are attributed specific rights, are subject to compulsory education and are excluded from participating (fully) in various spheres of the adult world, including work, political office and marriage, until they have reached a specified chronological age (Melchiorre, 2004). The precise chronological ages at which certain activities are expected and others pathologised are codified in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UN-CRC). Because of its near universal ratification governments the world over have implemented the age-normativity of the UN-CRC in national law.

Age-normativity has contributed to a greater variety of services for young people. However, it also leads much development practice to concentrate on young people who do not act out the normative script of age chronology (for the example of child labour, see Nieuwenhuys, 1996). Age-normativity underpins policy constructs such as ‘youth at risk’ that have received considerable critique (for example, Kelly, 2000). It also contributes to prioritising intervening in over understanding young people’s lives from their own perspectives, and produces particular framings of social problems that foreclose possible alternative forms of intervention (see, for example, the case of ‘child trafficking’; Huijsmans and Baker, 2012). When age-normativity is applied to entire life phases like childhood or youth, ‘it makes similarities between older and younger people difficult or impossible to see, and obscures heterogeneity’ between people of the same age (Laz, 1998, p. 97). The former leads to exclusion of people outside the target age group even though the issues addressed may also affect them. The latter contributes to one-size-fits-all interventions based on age.

Wyn and White’s (1997, pp. 97–98) distinction between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ perspectives on social life offers a remedy to overcome the limitations of age-normativity and the treatment of chronological age as an independent variable. The horizontal perspective comes close to the Mannheimian concept of ‘generation’, which refers to a shared generational location and is discussed by Jason Hart (this volume). Caroline Archambault (this volume) illustrates a horizontal perspective by explaining how the generational position of young Maasai excludes them from land ownership and any direct say in land tenure reform, even though the latter may affect their chances of inheriting land in significant ways. Simultaneously, through the medium of modern schooling their generational position exposes young Maasai, more so than any other generational grouping, to particular discourses on development that celebrate sedentary lifestyles, modern agriculture and utilitarianism (for a similar observation from a different context see Karuna Morarji’s article in this volume).

The contribution by Berckmoes and White (this volume) underscores the importance of combining horizontal perspectives with vertical ones. The latter illuminates how ‘the experiences, interests and perspectives of young people are integrally related to those of other people who share their social location’ (Wyn and White, 1997, p. 97). Various contributions to this special issue demonstrate that young people are never just young people; there are also gender relations, social classes, caste positions, ethnic groups, religious communities and so on. This highlights heterogeneity among young people and also shows that young people share social characteristics with older people. In Archambault’s article (this volume), for example, focusing on how other relations of social differentiation intersect with age explains why young women look at issues such as land reform in different ways to young men, and that young people’s perspective is affected by whether they come from large land-holding families or semi-landless families.

Despite the relevance of the concept of intersectionality for debunking age as an independent variable and for understanding heterogeneity between children and youth, the temporal dimension of age presents a challenge to its conceptualisation and methodological application. This is illustrated by Sharada Srinivasan’s contribution on daughter aversion in Tamil Nadu, India (this volume). Employing a longitudinal approach in which she follows a set of young girls from pre-puberty into early adulthood, Srinivasan shows that gender-based discrimination is evident throughout the lives of these young girls. Yet, the specific manner in which it manifests varies with girls’ accomplishing of age. Laz (1998, p. 100) explains that ‘in accomplishing age, we create and maintain selves, roles and identities’. This is realised through the mutually co-constituting relationship between agency and structuring relations (ibid., 1998, p. 101). In the southern Indian study context of Srinivasan’s article, girls’ accomplishing of age must be understood as highly gendered and circumscribed by their caste status, their birth-position and the socio-economic condition of their household.

The highly gendered manner of girls’ accomplishing of age throughout their girlhoods and into early womanhood is poorly captured by interventions based on the notion of the ‘girl child’ that have become popularised by, for example, PLAN’s Because I’m a Girl global campaign (see plan-international.org/girls/, accessed 23 September 2013). The ‘girl child’ seemingly addresses the intersection of relations of gender and age. Yet, it does so in a static manner that does not capture the relationality in which age is accomplished and it does not sufficiently illuminate the gendered constraints shaping the process. First, such campaigns typically reproduce dominant conceptualisations of time and space by portraying ‘certain phases of life (time, such as marriageable age) and certain places (space, such as school of family) as normal’, without marking their deep heteronormativity (Jauhola, 2011, no page numbers indicated). Second, age is always accomplished within other evolving social units, most notably the household (Huijsmans, 2012, 2013). Third, these micro-rhythms of human and household development interact with trajectories of socio-economic development. In Srinivasan’s article this is exemplified by the emergence of the sumangali scheme promoted by spinning mills, and to a lesser extent intentional developments such as activities of Non-Governmental Organisations targeted at girls that transform the spaces and structures in which age is accomplished in gendered and ‘classed’ manners.

Theorising the Interface between Development Studies and Children and Youth Studies: Generation and Social Reproduction

The analytical distinction between age and generation is often left vague even in literature that pertains specifically to these concepts (for example, Thorne, 2004). In part, this is due to the multiple interpretations of both concepts (Laz, 1998; Corsten, 1999, pp. 251–253). In the previous section, we identified age as an important ‘marker of social differentiation’ and a ‘structuration concept’ (Corsten, 1999, p. 250). We noted that development as a project of government has contributed much to making a particular conceptualisation of age, chronological age, important. Yet, research has shown that this does not preclude young people from drawing on ‘resources for doing age’ other than chronology to accomplish age (for example, Vigh, 2006; Clark-Kazak, 2009; Utrata, 2011).

Across the multiple interpretations of the concept of generation (see Jason Hart, this volume, for a detailed discussion), there is a shared concern with social reproduction. Social reproduction is an important theme in the development literature, yet it has received relatively little attention in the contemporary children and youth studies literature. Instead, the children and youth studies literature has come to revolve around the concept of agency to a great extent (for example, Evers et al, 2011). This was originally a response to socialisation approaches and the development psychology schools that long dominated the study of the young and allowed minimal conceptual space for young people as social actors (James and Prout, 1997; Woodhead, 1999; Burman, 2000). Yet, as Roy Gigengack (this volume) notes, this ‘new’ approach, which came to be known as the new social studies of childhood and youth, has arguably become the orthodoxy (see also Lancy, 2012).

The articles in this issue all recognise young people’s agentive capacities, yet resist romantic and celebratory interpretations of agency (following critical work on agency such as Gigengack, 2008; Huijsmans, 2011; Jeffrey, 2011, pp. 793–794; Valentine, 2011; Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2013). Young people’s agency is thus marked as potentially constituting a force of change, yet it is equally important for understanding social continuity. In theorising the interface between development studies and children and youth studies, we diverge, thus, from public discourse in which youth as a life phase and young people as a generation are often associated with ‘change’ and much less with social continuity. This is especially true for young people in relation to development, as was evidently the case, for example, in early reports of the ‘Arab Spring’. A tendency to emphasise change over continuity also characterises the academic discourse in children and, especially, youth studies (Cole, 2010, p. 9; MacDonald, 2011, p. 428). Yet, perhaps this is more characteristic of contemporary work in the field than the older literature. For example, in his theorisation of generations as cultural phenomena, Mannheim (1952) marked youth as a site of social continuity alongside viewing young people and adolescence as a force and life phase of agency and change (for early recognitions of children as social actors contributing to social continuity, see White, 1975; Schildkrout, 1978; Elson, 1982).

The articles in this issue re-insert the question of social continuity, alongside change, into the study of young people, thereby speaking to core concerns in the development literature yet from a distinct children and youth studies perspective. We do this primarily through a focus on the generational dynamics underpinning social reproduction. Social reproduction always encompasses a degree of change, and hence struggle. Therefore, it should not be understood as a static or mechanistic process that leaves things unchanged. Social reproduction ‘involves institutions, processes and social relations associated with the creation and maintenance of communities’ (Bakker and Silvey, 2008, pp. 2–3). It includes biological reproduction and the ongoing reproduction of labour, but it also includes the social construction of life phases such as childhood and youth, the social renewal of life phases as new members enter a life phase and others exit it, and the institutionalisation of life phases often in the name of development (Närvänen and Näsman, 2004). Social reproduction is generational: It is about social continuity and change between older and younger generations, as well as about continuity and change of life phases as generational categories.

For adult generations, young people constitute a means to access, and a site to influence, an unknown future (Smith, 2013). Young people are ‘one of the most governed sections of the population’ (Rose, 1990 in Bessant, 2003, p. 90), which suggests that important power differentials underpin the generational dynamics of social reproduction. The question of power is even more pronounced when it concerns the ‘government’ of poor children and youth in so-called developing contexts. Indeed, structural inequalities between the Global North and South added to those between the generations place the right to intervene in young and poor lives beyond question (Valentin and Meinert, 2009). Studies concerning interventions in young people’s lives that are, or ought to be, carried out in the name of development (for example, de Janvry and Sadoulet, 2006; Bourdillon and Myers, 2012) rarely mark the power relations from which such interventions emerge and that are reproduced or transformed in the process.

The articles in this volume illustrate three points. First, young people are central to social reproduction. Second, age and generation are key concepts for understanding young people’s position in social reproduction. Third, young people’s agency shapes and is shaped by the changing terms of social reproduction brought about by development. This is true in its most basic sense of family formation as discussed by Kristen Cheney in her article on inter-country adoption. But it is also true of the continuation of socially valued ways of becoming a productive adult as illustrated in the contribution by Lidewyde Berckmoes and Ben White, or in the constant renegotiation of relations of belonging in situations of ‘protracted displacement’ as discussed by Jason Hart. Karuna Morarji’s article engages with the question of social reproduction through the lens of governmentality, which allows her to examine education as a highly contradictory resource in relation to the changing terms of social reproduction unfolding across and within generations in rural North India. Roy Gigengack takes yet another approach. His concern is with the emergence of a particular post-development discourse around street children that depends on a partial reading of street children’s agency, and that overlooks issues of intergenerationality.

About the Articles

The seven articles in this special issue go some way in covering the breadth of the development literature, as they relate to specific sub-fields such as humanitarian studies, education, post-conflict studies, land reform and gender studies. They also cover the full age range of children and youth studies, with some contributions focusing on the very young (Cheney) and others paying attention to middle childhood (Srinivasan), secondary-school youth (Archambault) and out-of-school youth negotiating adulthood (Berckmoes and White). Geographically, the issue includes contributions from the Middle East (Hart), Sub-Saharan Africa (Archambault, Berckmoes and White), Latin America (Gigengack) and South Asia (Morarji, Srinivasan). This is complemented by two articles that take a global perspective (Cheney, Gigengack). These two articles make the important point that development, both as practice and as discourse, unfolds across the artificial geographical divide that for too long demarcated ‘the south’ as the exclusive space for development. Lastly, Nicola Ansell’s ‘commentary’ draws the diverse contribution to the special issue together and teases out some of the implications of ‘generationing’ development for both children and youth studies and development studies.

Three articles concern young people in rural areas and contribute towards important debates about the ‘generation problem’ (White, 2012) of development in rural areas. Karuna Morarji’s fine-grained ethnography illuminates the micro-politics of development and the generational tensions surrounding both economic and moral aspects of social reproduction. In her North Indian research site, teachers see themselves as key agents of development. Although teachers present education as essential for the entry of rural folk into the project of a modern India, they constantly reinforce the unattainability of this ideal through practices of boundary-marking between ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’. Morarji, thus, marks education and development as overlapping projects of power and contestation that play out in distinct generational ways, leaving rural youth to negotiate, often through failure and compromise, education as a highly contradictory resource.

Lidewyde Berckmoes and Ben White illuminate young people’s perceptions of and responses to difficulties in building livelihoods and successful generational transitions in the aftermath of conflict and under conditions of extreme poverty in rural Burundi. In contrast with a growing body of literature documenting that the current generation of rural youth holds no aspiration for a rural and agrarian future (for example, Rigg, 2006, p. 191; Bryceson and Jønsson, 2010, p. 384), Berckmoes and White contend that young people’s apparent turn away from agriculture is not due to an aversion to farming. Instead, structural limitations and a perceived failure of adults in providing sufficient support and guidance lead rural youth to engage in ‘fleeting responses’ to structural crises, with very limited scope for entering valued forms of social adulthood.

Caroline Archambault’s article presents a generational perspective on land tenure reform among the Maasai in Kenya. She argues that young people due to their generational location are uniquely positioned vis-à-vis questions of land tenure reform; their voices on these matters are generally not heard, yet it is their future livelihoods that are at stake. Contrasting adult perspectives on land tenure reform with that of school-going youth, she finds interesting generational differences in the anticipated conflicts associated with land tenure reform. Whereas the adult generation associates it with an increase in community-level conflict caused by misallocation, trespassing and the decline of a sense of community due to the privatisation of common lands, young people interpret land tenure reform more often as a solution to community-level conflicts. The conflicts that young Maasai associate with issuing of private title on land are located at the far more intimate level of the homestead, and are manifested between siblings and between siblings from different wives.

The articles by Jason Hart and Sharada Srinivasan both draw on longitudinal research. Hart draws on research with a group of Palestinian boys in Hussien Camp (in Amman, Jordan) whom he has followed through their second decade of life. Srinivasan, on the other hand, concentrates on a set of girls from Tamil Nadu, India, and follows them into early adulthood. Together the two articles powerfully illustrate how gender relations are key to understanding young people’s ‘age position’ (Hart, this volume). Hart’s article further advocates viewing young people not only as ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ but also as ‘having been’. The article demonstrates how the various interpretations of the concept of generation contribute to situating young people historically and how such awareness complicates any long-term solution for protracted refugee populations.

Srinivasan’s article also connects with Kristen Cheney’s. Together, the two contributions illuminate two sides of the same coin. Srinivasan’s article analyses the cultural reproduction of daughter aversion. It does so from a unique longitudinal perspective that allows her to tease out the diverse ways in which ‘unwantedness’ manifests and is experienced throughout the gendered life course and how girls navigate contexts characterised by gender-based violence. Importantly, this life course perspective also illuminates gendered dimensions of the intergenerational dynamics in the reproduction of daughter aversion. Contrary to what might be expected, it appears that girls who have grown up unwanted may well contribute, as adult women, to the continuity of daughter discrimination.

For the girls featuring in Srinivasan’s study (inter-country) adoption arguably constitutes an alternative to growing up in conditions of severe daughter aversion, and possibly daughter elimination (Srinivasan and Bedi, 2010). Yet, Cheney is critical of the ‘better life’ discourses that frequently revolve around inter-country adoption specifically. Instead, she posits that inter-country adoption must be seen as a marketisation of the most basic form of human reproduction, and links crises of social reproduction in affluent families in, for example, the United States with those in poor parts of Ethiopia. However, Cheney’s contribution also flags the limits of a political economic analysis of inter-country adoption. This is most evident in the discussion about adoptees’ ‘labor of passion’. This signals the limitations to which human beings can be seen as (passive) commodities. In addition, sending states’ active recruitment of adoptees and the incorporation of (adult) adoptees in state-designed development trajectories highlights the important role of the state in facilitating the marketisation of inter-country adoption and serves to show that the practice cannot be reduced to demand-side forces.

Lastly, Roy Gigengack’s article concerns the science of the study of street children. By constructing a genealogy of knowledge, he illuminates the paradigmatic conventions that have come to dominate the street children research and allowed ideological deconstructionism and populism to flourish at the cost of a more ethnographically informed understanding of street children. His invitation to rethink street children sociologically includes a recourse to forms of subjugated knowledge, and importantly also a call to liberate the field from the narrow generational confines of the children and youth studies literature.

Conclusion

The burgeoning field of children and youth studies has much to contribute to a deeper understanding of development and vice versa. In order to realise this potential, studies of young people’s (everyday) lives must be theorised in relation to ‘the wider processes, discourses and institutions to which these connect’ (Ansell, 2009, p. 191) and development studies must appreciate its subject as distinctly generational in its dynamics.

Overcoming the limitations of common categorising approaches to young people in development, we identified as a first analytical step. Critical engagement with concepts of age and generation help to conceptualise young people as social actors and life phases such as childhood and youth in relational terms. Furthermore, acknowledging the centrality of young people in social reproduction places them at the heart of development studies and leads the articles in this special issue to explore how young people’s agency shapes and is shaped by the changing terms of social reproduction brought about by development. The articles in this volume develop these overarching ideas in further detail, with reference to specific contexts, and informed by particular conceptualisations of development.

In doing so, the articles demonstrate the analytical relevance of ‘generationing’ development. They also show that teasing out the generational dynamics of development requires methodological approaches that go beyond an isolated focus on children or youth. The articles in the volume have dealt with this in two ways. First, Srinivasan and Hart have underscored the importance of longitudinal research with young people. This shows how life phases matter and highlights the importance of intersectionality, historicity and development interventions in understanding girls’ and boys’ accomplishing of age. Second, the other articles all demonstrated the importance of studying young lives in relation to people in other life phases, and the importance of theorising material obtained from research with children and youth in relation to broader debates in development studies.