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Paper short abstract

Beyond Western ideals of third-age agency, our study shows that older adults in post-socialist Romania remain in productive work as long as health allows - and sometimes beyond - driven by survival in a weak welfare regime where everyday life is a triage between food, medicine, and heating.

Paper long abstract

This study shows that older adults with age-related care needs in post-socialist Romania exercise extensive everyday agency - yet not in the form imagined by Western “ageing well” paradigms. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among older people ageing in place (qualitative interviews and participant observation), the study traces how everyday life is managed under conditions of care poverty. Agency here is not leisure, choice, or self-realisation, but practical work for firewood and food, and relation building in a welfare regime defined by fragmentation, inadequacy, and the absence of formal rights for older people.

Respondents describe later life as continuous triage between food, medication, and heating. Low pensions, high pharmaceutical costs, and minimal formal support mean that “every leu matters”. Older adults remain economically productive for as long as health allows, and sometimes beyond, because survival depends on it. The paper documents the concrete work this entails: securing income through small-scale labour, stretching supplies, and assembling unstable support arrangements through neighbours, distant kin, and informal exchanges. In a context shaped by emigration and thinning family care, participants also engage in delicate relational work to obtain support wherever possible.

The paper contributes to decolonising debates in the anthropology of ageing by refusing to treat Romania as a “lagging” case measured against Western benchmarks. Instead, it takes these late-life practices as analytically generative. It argues that dominant paradigms of “ageing well” can operate as a moral colonisation of later life, obscuring how actual agency persists when ageing is lived through scarcity and endurance.