Young people’s educational and work-related transitions unfold within social and economic structures operating at local, regional, national, and global scales. These structures are shaped by uneven power geometries that influence access to resources and opportunities. In addition to navigating structural constraints, young people must also relate to normative expectations and value regimes formed within families, communities, and public discourses, such as ideals of career-making as self-actualisation and expectations that individuals should adapt, reskill, and revise their plans over time. They negotiate and respond to these intersecting constraints and expectations in diverse ways across time and context, reflecting both their limited power and their capacity for strategic action.

Youth in Transitions examines how young people navigate pathways into adulthood in northern Sweden, a regional context marked by rapid labour market transformation. Historically shaped by depopulation and deindustrialisation, the region is now experiencing rapid, though uneven, large-scale ‘green’ industrial investment (Eriksson & Tollefsen 2018), which has created demand for new labour (Forsberg 2025). However, these investments have moved through several phases over a short period, from substantial expansion in the mid-2010s to a more restrained phase marked by retrenchment and bankruptcies in the early to mid-2020s (Adjei et al. 2024), and remain unevenly distributed across the region.

This paper synthesises key findings from the qualitative longitudinal Youth in Transitions project, some of which have been reported in earlier publications (e.g. Rönnlund and Tollefsen 2023a,b; Rönnlund et al. 2025). It examines how young people navigate their futures in relation to their structural positioning and the specific conditions of their home region, a European peripheral region undergoing far-reaching reindustrialisation. The 45 participants were 15 years old at the time of the first interviews and in their mid-twenties during the most recent round of data collection in 2025. The guiding research question is: What structural constraints did these young people face when navigating their educational and work-related transitions, and how did they engage with them? The paper contributes to broader debates on young people’s educational and work-related transitions and, more specifically, to scholarship on transitions in regions experiencing uneven reindustrialisation.

The analysis draws on a conceptual framework from human geography. We interpret the findings through the lenses of ‘power geometries’ (Massey 2005, 2024) and ‘constrained youth agency’, a concept adapted from ‘constrained labour agency’ (Coe & Jordhus-Lier 2023). To analyse how young people engage with structural constraints, we also draw on ‘disaggregated agency’ (Katz 2004), which distinguishes between three forms of social response to injustice and unequal power relations: resilience, reworking, and resistance. While labour geographers have used Katz’s R-concepts to describe strategies among employees and trade union members, this triad has also been applied in youth research to categorise the coping strategies young people use as they navigate transitions into adulthood.

The paper draws on data from a qualitative longitudinal research project examining school-to-work transitions among young people in rural small towns and settlements in two municipalities in northern Sweden, a region undergoing far-reaching but unevenly distributed reindustrialisation. Although the sites share working-class profiles, they differ in population size, labour market traditions, and geographical location. The study includes 45 participants. The first interviews were conducted in 2015, when the participants were 15 years old. These interviews generated rich contextual data on their upbringing environments, educational experiences, aspirations, and local opportunity structures. This first round was followed by individual interviews conducted in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025, enabling an in-depth qualitative longitudinal approach. Although not all participants took part in every interview round, the dataset comprises 219 interviews spanning the transition from lower secondary school into early adulthood. Throughout the project, the data were systematically processed using the case-profile method (Thomson 2007, 572). This involved condensing interview and ethnographic material into cumulative case profiles for each participant. These profiles provide longitudinally structured accounts that capture both change and continuity over time and summarise how individual transitions unfold across key biographical fields, particularly education and paid work. The resulting case profiles form a comprehensive qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) dataset that supports both individual-level and cross-case comparative analyses. For this paper, to illuminate how agency is enacted in relation to the structural conditions shaping young people’s transitions, we organised the material around three key transition phases: (1) the transition to upper secondary education, (2) the transition to higher education, and (3) the transition to work/employment. We then scrutinised the data relating to each of these phases in order to identify prominent patterns. Given the large volume of material and the uniqueness of each individual career pathway, this was challenging. However, several prominent overarching themes could be identified, and interview excerpts illustrating these themes were analysed through the lenses of ‘power geometries’, ‘constrained youth agency’, and ‘disaggregated agency’.

The findings show that uneven local opportunity structures, shaped by regional power geometries, strongly influenced young people’s educational and work-related transitions. Within these multi-scalar constraints, participants enacted forms of agency that illustrate the dynamics of constrained youth agency. The analysis traces these dynamics across transitions to (1) upper secondary education, (2) higher education, and (3) work/employment. Across all phases, young people’s strategies align with Katz’s framework of disaggregated agency, clustering primarily around resilience and reworking. These strategies represent pragmatic, locally situated adaptations within unequal power geometries, with limited scope for overt resistance. Transitions into work unfolded within a broader regional context characterised by rapid ‘green’ industrial expansion. A key finding is that participants related only weakly and implicitly to these structural transformations. Despite intense media and political attention to major green investments in northern Sweden, and high demand for labour in emerging industries (Eriksson et al. 2024; Adjei et al. 2024), developments in the regional labour market rarely served as explicit reference points in their narratives. While some participants expressed a general awareness of industrial change, they did not position themselves as future participants in these developments, nor were they actively recruited by major investors. This distancing illustrates how constrained youth agency operates when structural change is unevenly distributed and when young people occupy disadvantaged positions within regional power geometries.

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