The Capability to Stay: New Directions for the Aspiration-Capability Framework in Migration Research

This paper introduces the capability to stay – the substantive freedom to achieve well-being in place – as a vital addition to the aspiration-capability framework in migration studies. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approach and Hein de Haas’ definition of human mobility, I argue that true mobility freedom encompasses both the capability to migrate and the capability to stay, and that these capabilities are not simply inverses of one another. The same development process – like rising educational attainment or market expansion – can expand migration capability while eroding staying capability, a dynamic obscured when analysis attends only to movement. Through contrasting cases from Morocco, Mexico, and Ethiopia, I demonstrate how integrating the capability to stay into the aspiration-capability framework provides conceptual tools to distinguish migration across the forced to voluntary spectrum, while remaining attentive to diverse immobility outcomes in the same setting. The paper develops a typology of capability configurations crossing migration and staying capabilities; introduces personal, social, and environmental conversion factors as approaches to studying the determinants of migration and staying capability; and considers strategies for empirical research on the capability to stay. By integrating the capability to stay, the aspiration-capability framework gains analytical purchase on displacement dynamics, development-induced dispossession, and diverse climate-related (im)mobilities–phenomena of growing significance that the current framework inadequately addresses.