Politics of Aspiration

Why study the politics of aspiration?

The core insight: Social protection acts as an aspirational springboard, and a consumption floor is only its base. When poor households have guaranteed employment, secure food, protected land rights, and information access, they can afford to take productive risks (investing in children's education, adopting new technologies, migrating for better work) that drive long-term mobility. Understanding the policy framework behind these rights is essential context.

Evidence-based practice

Learn to evaluate NREGA, RTI, Food Security, and Forest Rights using rigorous evidence, including indicators that matter, what works, what doesn't, and why implementation varies across states.

Theoretical foundations

Understand how Appadurai's capacity to aspire, Sen's capability approach, and Ray's aspirations economics explain why rights-based policy enables mobility.

South Asian context

Deep comparative analysis of the social protection systems of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan: where they converge, where they diverge and what practitioners can learn. See also our Gender Studies course for how gender shapes access to these rights.

"[The capacity to aspire] is not evenly distributed in any society. It is a sort of meta-capacity, and the relatively rich and powerful invariably have a more fully developed capacity to aspire... The poorer members, precisely because of their lack of opportunities to practice the use of this navigational capacity (in turn because their situations permit fewer experiments and less easy archiving of alternative futures), have a more brittle horizon of aspirations. ... I am not saying that the poor cannot wish, want, need, plan, or aspire." Arjun Appadurai, "The Capacity to Aspire" (2004)