The “capacity to aspire” in migrants' life projects and trajectories: A new lens on the migration-development nexus?

This paper explores the relevance of Appadurai’s “capacity to aspire” to the migration-development debate. Migration, in this optic, can be helpfully understood as an aggregate, if uncoordinated exercise of individual (and familial) capacities to aspire, under a variety of external constraints. Its  contribution to the homeland’s development, while variable and case-sensitive, still seems relatively understudied with respect to migrants’ capacities to cultivate a future-oriented agency, while potentially keeping connected with their home societies, even from abroad. 

Building on my ethnographic and biographic analysis of the transnational ties between a group of Ecuadorian migrants to Italy and their non-migrant counterparts, I will understand migrants’ capacity to aspire as a socially stratified and unevenly distributed resource – one that, however, deserves to be factored in the current M&D debate as far as three issues are concerned:

 - the grassroots expectations of a better future, however vague, that drive emigration – hence the relevance of future life aims as a cognitive, emotional and moral anchor for migrants’ life trajectories (and as a critical factor for “mapping” their position in the development field) ;

- the changes migrants’ home-related inclinations undergo as a result of their exposure to different social networks, cultural milieus and life conditions abroad;

- importantly, and simultaneously, the faceted impact of emigration on the mindsets, social representations and capacities to aspire of those left behind.

The impingements of migrants’ capacity to aspire on development, and social change more broadly, should be stratified in the light of its contents, transnational reach and differential potential to be turned into a “collective asset”, rather than being (legitimately) circumscribed to one’s personal or familial interests. How do migrants’ physical detachment from home, and their social inclusion abroad, affect the “home-side” of their capacity to aspire? What are the consequences for development in home societies?