Development implications of involuntary immobility in Africa

This project provides an integrated perspective on the implications of involuntary immobility for development. More specifically, we focus on the consequences that not (yet) realized migration aspirations have on individuals’ subjective well-being, life aspirations and forward looking behavior, with a focus on West Africa. We will break new ground in economics and sociology by integrating findings, concepts and methods from these disciplines. We build on intuitions from ethnographic fieldwork on migration aspirations and further theorize these by integrating concepts from sociology (involuntary immobility) and economics (aspiration traps, aspiration failure, forward looking behavior). We advance the empirical investigation of these relationships by innovative uses of secondary data, collecting original longitudinal data and integrating methods from both disciplines (advanced econometrics to disentangle causality; event-history analysis; content and discourse analysis; process tracing).