LAUSR

front the dialectical relationships between personal development and structural preconditions. It accommodates indicators across employment (income), education and health and considers opportunities for participation in social and economic life. Otto’s scholarly volume confronts many of the paradoxes and exposes much of the rhetoric, at both European and (through a critical analysis of programmes) national levels, around education, work and voice. Capability considerations are usually nowhere to be found. Only on the final pages does the book celebrate the contribution, in this direction, of the European Youth Strategy and the non-formal education component of the Erasmus+ programme. To build on this, sharing new perspectives across the youth field is the way forward, thereby carrying (in the words of Schröer, p. 383 in the volume edited by Otto) ‘the chance to stronger connect the field of education and training, youth work and voluntary work, as well as citizenship building and participation’. There may be a strong case for ‘one stop shops’ for young people, whether through a public employment service or something else, that can consider the appropriate response to individual needs, characteristics and aspirations, but there is no case at all for a ‘one-size fits all’ approach. For too long, public policy directed towards unemployed young people, based on deficit models of their condition, has recurrently proved ineffective. The fascinating and impressive array of projects described in these texts provides glimpses of the greater potential of alternative, more flexible, approaches. I say glimpses because many are quite new and often experimental; there would be huge questions as to whether they could be ‘scaled up’ even if that was deemed desirable. Their positive evaluations are, in many cases, acknowledged to be somewhat tentative, even speculative. Not that the intention was to provide any particular alternative bespoke model but rather to change the way we think about meaningful and relevant policy responses across the heterogeneity of contexts and reasons for youth unemployment. From the evidence and arguments posited, public debate needs to move, as observed by Alwall & Lannerheim, p. 171 in the volume edited by Sirovátka & Spies, ‘from the instrumental to the generic, from the system to the truly social and from the idea that social inclusion can be implemented from above to an understanding of how trust needs to be built through genuine interaction between people and carrying the initiative together’. Such assertions, albeit in less sophisticated and elaborated theoretical forms than those proposed in these two texts, have in fact been around for many years, but stubbornly resisted at governmental levels. Now, perhaps, their time has come.