Rethinking Progress in a Fragmented Swedish Welfare System: Narrative Trajectories of NEET-Situated Young People

Abstract Young people who are not in employment, education, or training (NEET) are positioned within policy discourses that assume linear movement from school to work and clear distinctions between participation and non-participation. Such perspectives risk obscuring how trajectories are shaped by the institutional arrangements through which support is organised and encountered. This study examines how decentralised and activation-oriented welfare arrangements in a northern Swedish municipality shaped the timing, pacing, and continuity of NEET-situated trajectories. Drawing on narrative interviews with young people in contact with local welfare services, and using agency as a theoretical lens, the analysis explores how effort and engagement were paced, sustained, redirected, or restrained over time. The findings show overlapping patterns: experiences of being stuck, and experiences of fragile stability and precarious progress. Across these trajectories, young people remained active in managing everyday life, responding to conditional demands, navigating institutional contacts, and protecting limited stability. However, support was often present without translating into meaningful progress: effort could be absorbed by coordination and compliance, while attempts to move forward could expose fragile stability to new risks. Progress rarely appeared as linear movement into employment or education, but was gradually and unevenly rebuilt through stabilisation, regained trust, supportive relationships, and improved everyday functioning. The study suggests that agency among NEET-situated young people should be understood not as an individual capacity alone, but as shaped through fragmented welfare arrangements. Rethinking progress requires attention to how institutions structure time, responsibility, and risk, and to forms of movement overlooked in performance-oriented welfare systems.