From Exit to Cultivation: Future Imaginaries and Youth Agency in Albania Through Repeated Causal Layered Analysis

This essay examines how young adults in Albania imagine the country’s path to Europe and how those imaginaries change through repeated discussion. Drawing on three waves of Causal Layered Analysis workshops with university students in Tirana, it compares dominant “used futures” with desirable alternatives. The study identifies movement not simply from pessimism to optimism, but from diffuse frustration toward clearer diagnoses of insecurity, blocked civic circulation, weak institutional responsiveness, and the conditions needed to make alternative futures credible. It argues that repeated futures-oriented methods can reveal how youth agency and socially believable futures develop over time.