Across Europe, economically and demographically declining regions offer fewer and more limited educational and occupational opportunities for young people. These opportunities are often restricted further for young people who are in vulnerable and multi-disadvantaged situations, as the vulnerabilities are connected to and impacted by their limited resources and capacities. While many young people move from declining to more thriving regions in search for better and more versatile educational and labour market opportunities, some choose (or are forced by their circumstances) to stay. In this study, we focus on this latter group of ‘grounded youth’, their agency, perceptions, and capabilities to build their own futures in four declining regions across Europe: Kainuu in Finland, Gabrovo in Bulgaria, Halle (Saale) in Germany, and Tâmega e Sousa in Portugal.

In this study, we examine, first, the reasons and reasonings behind these young people’s ‘immobility’ – that diverges from the mobility imperative often experienced by youth in declining spaces (c.f., Farrugia, 2016). Second, we also seek to answer the question of how young people in vulnerable and multi-disadvantaged life situations construct their own life courses within their (locally available and mostly limited) opportunity structures, life histories, educational spaces, and social circumstances in declining European regions. We draw from theorisations of life course research (e.g., Mortimer & Shanahan, 2003) and opportunity structures (Roberts, 2009) together with the critical perspectives of spatial justice (Soja, 2013). Thus, the study addresses the effects of limited opportunity structures and intersecting vulnerabilities on these young people’s perception of space and agency, within the context of declining regions.

In life course research, individuals are not merely seen as being imbued by social forces, order, and institutions, but also as active agents who respond and act to change them. Thus, while societal structures, institutions, and policies constrain life courses, at the same time, individuals can affect the formation of their life courses by their own action. That is, individuals exercise their agency within the limits of opportunity structures. The concept of opportunity structure refers generally to circumstances and factors surrounding individuals shaping their opportunities and agency encompassing economic, political, social, and technological conditions, as well as cultural values and norms. Research on youth transitions (e.g., Rambla & Kovacheva, 2023) has indicated that opportunity structures can both facilitate and constrain individual agency and tend to play a crucial role for young people’s future prospects. Furthermore, the spatial justice approach, which is crucial when conducting in-depth comparative analyses in various spatial contexts, emphasises the significance of space as an active force shaping human life and draws attention to the interaction of space and power (Soja, 2013; Williams, 2013). It helps to unveil how spaces interact with the life courses of young people, and how unjust spatial dispersion of population creates conditions that further stigmatise and marginalise disadvantaged groups.

We conducted narrative biographical interviews with young people in vulnerable and multi-disadvantaged life situations who live and plan to stay in the four declining regions (age 18–30; N = 33) in early 2024 within a European research project ‘Constructing Learning Outcomes in Europe: A multi-level analysis of (under)achievement in the life course’ (CLEAR; https://clear-horizon.eu/). The interdisciplinary, mixed-methods CLEAR project explores the combination of multiple factors that shape young people’s learning outcomes and affect their quality across European regions. Based on a better understanding of the processes of constructing learning outcomes, CLEAR inquiries into the impact of policies to boost achievement and tackle underachievement, and designs participative activities at local level to spark innovative policy solutions. The project is conducted between 2022–2025 in eight EU countries, including Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation funding programme under Grant Agreement No. 101061155. In addition to a contextual analysis of young people’s living conditions and relevant regional policies on youth, education, and the labour market, in the study at hand, we analyse how these young people make biographical sense of the surrounding opportunity structures, and how they exercise their agency in building and navigating their educational and labour market trajectories in the challenging spatial conditions with qualitative content analysis and illustrative case studies. The former enables us to address not only manifest content but also the themes and core ideas found in texts including contextual information and latent content (Drisko & Maschi, 2015).

The analysis highlights the ways in which the specific constellations of structural, institutional, and relational factors in the four regions shape the life courses of young people in vulnerable and multi-disadvantaged situations who have decided to stay in their home locality. Although all four regions are experiencing relative economic and demographic decline and bear a common negative vision of the locality (Löw, 2016) in their national contexts, they differ in the sources of social vulnerabilities to which their youth are exposed at the intersection of factors such as class, gender, ethnicity, health, and family situation. The study will address the question of social justice both considering the fair distribution of educational, health care, and labour market opportunities and the extent to which policymakers devise and manage measures that are pertinent for different locales. The dominant policy expectations across the countries are for a smooth and straightforward progression through the stages of education and training and to the labour market (Rambla et al., 2024), but young people’s trajectories in the regions are highly diverse and de-standardised. Young adults attribute diverse subjective meanings to education and academic achievement; for them learning is about learning for life and about oneself, for designing life projects, and pursuing subjective dreams (Järvinen et al., 2024). In the four regions, many young people in vulnerable life situations invest in learning outcomes when they are relevant for their life courses and biographies and actively try to expand their educational and employment opportunities. Yet, others adapt more passively, lowering aspirations or creating narratives of spatial (under)achievement. While some willingly create lives in the declining regions relying on the economic capital and social support of families, friends, and neighbours, others feel forced to do so and cherish plans to move away in an indefinite future where their circumstances might change.

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