The European Union’s Right to Stay strategy aims to ensure that citizens are not forced to leave the places they call home due to economic reasons. While representing a significant move in cohesion policy, the strategy remains conceptually underdeveloped in its consideration of rural youth mobilities. This commentary argues that its effectiveness is limited by four implicit dualisms that continue to shape both policy and research: structure versus agency, localism versus globalism, rural versus urban, and staying versus leaving. These binaries fail to capture the complex, relational, and increasingly fluid mobility trajectories of rural young people. Driven by the concept of sense of place, the paper proposes a place-based framework combining attachment, identity, dependence, and satisfaction to understand how rural young people experience mobility decisions. It argues that the objective of the Right to Stay strategy should not be to reduce rural young people’s mobility, but to expand their mobility choices by enabling them to remain, leave, commute, circulate, or return according to their aspirations rather than territorial constraints. The paper concludes by outlining how a sense of place perspective can inform the future design and implementation of EU cohesion policy.

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rigth to stay,European Union,rural youth,mobilities,sense of place

• Psychology - Social Sciences
• Social and Economic Geography - Social Sciences