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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how age categories reshape access and distribution in a South African workfare programme. Amid bureaucratic efforts to prioritise youth, ethnographers must balance differentiating participants’ aspirations against emphasising shared needs for income security across age groups.

Paper long abstract

Welfare is a key domain in which bureaucratic differentiation becomes salient, as categories mediate access to material benefits and sanctions. In post-apartheid South Africa, a formally deracialised welfare system remains strongly productivist, despite widespread unemployment. For those deemed able to work, accessing income support requires them to labour on public work projects.

Drawing on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork within one public work programme, this paper examines how the bureaucratic category of youth (aged 18 - 35) emerged as a priority target group, and the dilemmas its application produced for bureaucrats and the researcher alike. Although this programme offered exceptionally low stipends, it also permitted long-term participation, effectively acknowledging the need for ongoing income support. Largely avoided by youth, it sustained mostly older participants. Often enrolled for many years, they derided their “stuckness”. Still, reflecting higher-up directives, recruitment and training opportunities were largely restricted to youth. Locally, this required managers to exclude older participants, even as the willingness of youth to work and rigid age boundaries were questioned.

Over time, these distinctions hardened amid fiscal pressures and the looming threat of unionisation. Policy changes effectively affirmed desires for mobility but particularised them to youth, for whom programme exit rather than formalisation as public-sector employees was envisaged. And they de-emphasised the shared need for income security across age groups, including those cobbling together livelihoods through multiple public schemes. This paper argues that differentiation enables divergent political projects. In the present context, ethnographic commitments to nuance may need to be weighed against universalism.