DRAFT: From Entitlements to Affordances: Rethinking Educational Equity through Infrastructural Compatibility Dr. Trey Menefee SIG Science May 19, 2025 Abstract This article proposes a reframing of educational equity through the lens of affordance theory, adapted from ecological psychology and infrastructure studies. Drawing on and extending Amartya Sen's entitlement approach, it argues that equitable education requires not only formal access but infrastructural and relational compatibility between learners and systems. Using Cambodia as a central case, the article demonstrates how policy frameworks that focus on inputs and enrollments can obscure profound failures of affordance—where education technically exists, but functionally excludes. Through an original typology of structural relationalities and a comparative lens on educational systems, this article offers a framework for diagnosing where systems appear inclusive but are materially unusable for marginalized learners. It concludes by proposing a research and policy agenda for affordance equity. I. Introduction: Beyond Entitlements, Toward Affordance Theory Traditional educational equity frameworks rooted in entitlement theory—such as those developed by Amartya Sen—focus on what is formally provided, but not what is usable or accessible in practice. In comparative education, this has often led to metrics centered on inputs (schools built, fees removed, teachers deployed) or outputs (enrollment, completion), while overlooking structural incompatibility between learners' lived conditions and the demands of schooling systems. A school may exist, and fees may be nominally abolished, but if students cannot reach it, cannot understand the language, cannot afford the time or private tutoring it presupposes—then the system has failed in affordance, even if entitlements are satisfied on paper. We bridge three literatures: Sen's entitlement theory (economic famine, later capabilities), Gibson's affordance theory (ecological psychology), and the sociology of infrastructural exclusion (Scott, Tilly, Bray). By reframing educational provision as a matter of affordances—structured opportunities for meaningful action within systemic constraints—we