The current VET policy and practice orthodoxy is not working despite the efforts of educators and learners. The futures for which VET is intended to prepare people are ever more precarious at the individual, societal and planetary levels. While better futures are possible, VET is poorly positioned to respond to the new skilling needs these will require.

Therefore, we ask 1) what a VET system would look like that could play a supportive role in just transitioning and 2) what implications this question has for a future-oriented research agenda for VET.

Our research foregrounds the skills ecosystems approach, drawing most from Spours and his four key elements: collaborative horizontalities, facilitating verticalities, mediation through common mission and ecosystem leadership, and ecological time. 

In expanding the approach to African contexts, we find the basic analytical tools hold. Nonetheless, we extend the approach significantly.

We argue for a strong ontological grounding in constructing such ecosystems and including some of what has historically been excluded from VET thinking and praxis (e.g., a wider notion of work). We offer three main dimensions. 

1. Our more explicit engagement with political ecology points to further development of an account of VET’s purpose distinct from the productivist–human capital origins that permeates VET thinking. We make an axiological and ontological move by arguing VET’s purpose should encompass furthering collective human flourishing and integral human development. 

2. We make the realtional aspect more explicit through application of notions of relational agency and relational capability. 

3. We draw on critical realism to underpin how we see the interaction of vertical and horizontal. By drawing on Bhaskar’s laminated approach, we can address  the question of how levels interact.

Whilst social ecosystems thinking proved useful, it did not provide sufficient conceptual tools to drive our work. Rather, it provided the middle layer of our conceptual approach. At a more generalised level, we located our expansion of the approach in critical realism. 

In our empirical work, we adopted a further set of lenses.

1. We addressed informality, reflecting the majority reality of global economic life. The settings we researched included large numbers of actors, simultaneously engaged in enterprise activities and living lives as humans; always operating in complex relational webs. In such settings, anchor institutions are hard to find. Rather, we saw network catalysts, providing frameworks for fractal processes of deepening relationality. We explored the dynamism of young people’s navigational capabilities for finding new paths through living, working and learning. Their use of relationships and social media were apparent. 

2. We considered the part played by vocational teachers, taking an expansive view of who counted as such. We see tthem as central to all ecosystem aspects, as interpreters of curriculum, scaffolders of learning and connectors to work. We explore the importance teachers place on building horizontal relationships within and across institutions and community organisations.

3. We examined how the ecosystem approach could inform the education–to–work transitions debate. In agreeing with those who problematise such transitions and point to nonlinear and blocked transitions, and the role of intersectional inequality therein, we considered questions of how the vertical and horizontal, and mediation between them, contribute to facilitating transitions. Indeed, in more formal or hybrid labour market contexts, anchor organisations remain crucial. Here, leadership was being provided by diverse learning institutions including VET institutions. How localised colearning networks can be support became an important focus. 

4. We considered universities' roles in supporting skills ecosystems and localised colearning networks. Through our experience as actors in skills ecosytems, we explore universities' potential to make verticalities more facilitating through the particular advantages that they have in convening other actors. 

The paper reflects on a 3 year, 2 country study, conducted by 4 partner universities (the author affiliation list reflects this plus the subsequent move of the PI to another university). We used a mixed method approach, including face-to-face and online interviews and focus groups (with learners and staff in vocational institutions, employers in the formal and informal sectors, civil society actors and youth); participatory action research with community groups and TVET college staff; analysis of social media interactions in learning networks; surveys of lecturers; analysis of policy texts; and critical reflections on team members’ work as policy and practice actors. We organised the project around four case studies, designed to offer diverse contexts broadly reflecting different VET imperatives. We looked across both rural-urban and formal-informal divides. The Durban-KZN North Coast region is a large urban and industrial conurbation, selected because the South African state had identified it as a strategic gateway through its port and airport, and had sought to build its capacity, including a skills dimension. Alice is a small town in rural, former homeland, Eastern Cape, South Africa. We selected it due to our prior involvement in a support programme for small-scale agriculture through a learning network centred on water conservation. The Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom of Western Uganda, centred on Hoima, was chosen as the site of major ongoing development activity linked to the opening of a new oilfield. As well as national investment, the area has seen donor support to skills development from the World Bank and a consortium of bilateral agencies. Finally, the city of Gulu in Northern Uganda, formerly the centre of international humanitarian efforts in the wake of the infamous Lord's Resistance Army uprising was selected as being in the process of transitioning to a new developmental model, whilst being remote from much formal economic activity in East Africa. Here we focused on the intersections between the formal and informal economy, and the experiences of Gulu University in mediating relationships between them.

Though rooted in African contexts, our approach explicitly talks back to European traditions of VET research and its arguments have wider salience globally. They point to the need to see VET expansively, starting from where individuals and communities are engaged in vocational learning of whatever kind, rather on the dominant VET modalities of the extant research literature; considering their myriad purposes in engaging in such learning for livelihoods and lives, and not just skills for formal employment; and focusing on the need to sustain individuals, communities and the planet, and not just produce more. They also highlight the centrality of relationality, of multiscalarity, and of an ecosystem perspective, pointing towards rich new theoretical possibilities for VET research globally.

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