A Political Economy of Lifelong Learning (LLL) for Decent Work and Just Transitions?

This chapter revisits a number of the aims and purposes of this book, and presents an overview of key dimensions of the challenges and opportunities that shape the informal economies, and the experiences of informal workers, of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Asia–Pacific (AP). The chapter frames this discussion through an engagement with the ways in which skills, education and training and contested ideas about Lifelong Learning (LLL) are understood as being central to the problem of “informality”, and as the “panacea” to this problem. We review our argument that conceiving of these challenges and opportunities as being structured by a “political economy” of LLL provides a productive avenue to draw on diverse, but critical, theoretical and methodological tools in developing our analysis. The chapter concludes by engaging with the work of McGrath et al. (J Vocat Educ Train 72:465–487, 2020), their identification of a number of emerging trends in VET scholarship in Africa—framed by a focus on Policy, Systems and Institutions, Vocational Knowledge, a Critical Capabilities Approach, VET for Community Development and Skills for Sustainable Development—and our exploration of how these possibilities might be productive in other postcolonial and development contexts.