Poster #2 - Activated, Empowered, Abandoned, and Insecurity: A Process-tracing Approach to Evaluating Youth-focused Active Labor Market Policies

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Youth are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults even in contexts with strong economic growth (Kalleberg, 2018). This economic insecurity and unemployment among youth can have serious societal and economic implications (Gregg, 2024; Kalleberg and Vallas, 2018). Thus, active labor market policies in advanced post-industrial democracies have long focused on promoting economic and social outcomes including labor activation, training, work conditioning, and responsibilization among the unemployed and workers navigating various transitions (Bonoli, 2013; Kluve, 2010; Esping-Andersen, 1990; Kalleberg and Vallas, 2018). With recent demographic shifts and policy diffusion, youth-oriented active labor programs are continually adopted in developing regions to address unemployment. Unfortunately, aggregated impact evaluation of them have had limited utility in explaining the multiple pathways that program participation affects outcomes for diverse groups. Current assessments also pay minimal attention to the complex nature of labor activation program delivery in developing countries where there are high levels of unemployment with low labor market absorption and matching.
This early study fills these empirical gaps by drawing on the analytical conceptions of precarity (Bourdieu, 1998; Standing, 2011; Kalleberg, 2018) while applying an outcome-explaining process-tracing method (Collier, 2011; George and Bennett 2005; Beach and Pedersen 2012) to assess how program design and delivery results in varied labor activation impact outcomes for youth. Consequently, we examine the case of an at-scale, government-led national youth activation labor program in Ghana to document how the design and delivery affects participants' material positions in various consequential ways. Our study is therefore guided by two research questions: (1) How do young adults evaluate their experiences with the design and delivery of an active labor market program? (2) What are the heterogeneous outcomes present in young-adults engagement with the active labor program in areas of training, integration, and pathways?
The study is built on broad based empirical data including ongoing interviews with participants in the Nation Builders Corps Labor Program in Ghana from 2018 to 2022, policy documents, official reports and published contents. The analytic approach includes a within-case causal process-tracing, to understand the causal links between active labor policy delivery and economic insecurity. 
Preliminary findings show that, active labor market intervention delivery in developing country contexts can be grouped and explicated in four different outcome mechanisms: ie. activation, empowerment, abandonment, and insecurity. These varying outcomes offer a new perspective on the proximal and distal consequences of active labor market programs on various groups in developing country contexts.  
This study contributes in two ways. First, our holistic approach based on theory shows the mechanisms and differential outcomes of youth-oriented labor programs. This perspective explains the consequential effects that range from activation for employment to economic insecurity of even well-intentioned programs. Secondly, it offers an alternative impact evaluation of active labor market policies which have traditionally been evaluated based on aggregated outcomes using randomized control trials and cost benefit analysis. The process-tracing approach unmasks the variations in how labor programs create impact. We conclude with lessons for transformative and resilient labor market integration policies for vulnerable groups.

Author

• Donatus Doe, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author