Ruth Edmonds
In this article, Ruth explains what agency means and explores her thinking about ‘ambiguous agency’. She focuses on how young people’s exercise of agency in cross-cultural contexts can challenge accepted ideas about childhood and young people’s behaviour. Ruth examines the implications for how practitioners work with and support young people. She calls for greater efforts to localise understandings of agency.
Introducing agency
What is agency?
Agency is an individual’s capacity
(perceived or actual)
to make decisions and act on them.
The concept of agency and ideas about young people as agentic actors (those who exercise agency) are well-known within childhood and youth studies. Agency is exercised, not owned. It is not a characteristic a person ‘has’ but a process they use within particular social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. In international development, agency is the process through which individuals consider and choose between potential actions. It is how they make and transform these decisions into individual or collective actions and outcomes.
To exercise agency, young people need the ability to make decisions – individually or collectively – about their daily and future lives. How a young person exercises agency depends on various individual factors. These include their attitudes, knowledge, know-how, skills, gender, age, etc. However, agency depends on more than individual identities, capacities, and characteristics. It is affected by the social and cultural environment around young people and the influences that work to either expand or constrain their ability to exercise agency. Such influences include relationships, interactions with organisations and institutions, one’s own and others’ cultural beliefs and experiences of poverty, and regional or national policies and laws.
Therefore, young people exercise their capacities to decide and act along a kind of scale. At one end of the scale are everyday decisions and actions taken within limiting contexts. At the other end is the ability to act within a broad range of options. Agency along this scale depends on structures, contexts, and relationships that can constrain or expand young people’s choices.
Ambiguous agency
Agency is often seen as something that enables young people to exercise freedoms or realise their rights in ways that are in line with moral and social expectations for their behaviour. My colleague, Lorenzo Bordonoro, and I developed the notion of ambiguous agency. We wanted to highlight the difference between the ideas that international development organisations have about agency, and how young people want to express agency in different contexts.
The concept of ambiguous agency highlights how young people’s expressions of agency go against the established and often Western ideas about childhood and what young people should do and where they should do it. Such expressions of agency are often thought to be not ‘the right kind of agency’. They are seen as problematic or not seen as agency at all.
Implications for practice
Limiting how they interpret agency can affect how international development organisations act in response to young people’s expressions of agency. Practitioners’ activities might not match young people’s realities. They might seek to rescue children and/or correct their behaviour. Such actions could unintentionally increase young people’s vulnerabilities and put them at risk of harm. For example, programmes that simply seek to remove a child from the street might not acknowledge the complexity of their street-connectedness.
In 2016, I conducted research with adolescent girls in Rwanda. There were big differences between their life goals and the organisation’s programme goals for addressing issues connected with early pregnancy. The girls wanted to get pregnant only once they were married. This would gain and preserve their agaciro – their value and reputation among family and community members.
However, the organisation’s goal was to delay pregnancy until a specific biological age, regardless of the girls’ marital status. The question of age was not important to the girls. This mis-match between the programme’s intentions and the girls’ preferences risked the effectiveness of the programme outcomes and could have harmed the girls by interfering with their agaciro.
Localising agency
Engaging seriously and meaningfully with young people’s ambiguous agency means supporting efforts to develop context-appropriate understandings of agency. Academics and practitioners need to make understandings of, and responses to, young people’s agency, including their ambiguous agency, more locally relevant. We need new directions in research and practice to support such efforts.
Agency should not just be about generating and using young people’s perspectives. It needs to involve understanding the local social and cultural contexts which underpin these perspectives and help us make sense of them. My research in Rwanda developed a culturally grounded understanding of the adolescent girls’ identities, relationships, and actions, and how these influenced their decision-making and action in relation to their health experiences and goals.
Doing this helped to show girls’ agency in a different light. Therefore, rather than relying on cultural preferences and assumptions from other contexts to understand agency, development organisations should cultivate interpretations of agency that are connected with the social and cultural elements of agency in the particular contexts in which they are working.
Developing and using such locally relevant understandings of agency helps practitioners align with young people’s realities and work in ways that support their own versions of their ‘best interests’. This helps ensure programme goals are locally impactful and avoid unintended negative consequences.
Developing locally grounded agency-related practice can be difficult. It is not always easy to recognise when our own interpretations and perspectives on the world are the product of deeply held cultural assumptions. More locally relevant agency-related practice requires reflection and scrutiny of all the cultural systems that impact how we make sense of young people’s agency. This means focusing on the cultural systems of young people themselves, as well as those of the researcher, the policymaker, and the programme practitioner, all of whom have the power to make decisions and take action.
This article draws on the discussions published in the following articles.
[1] https://bit.ly/eer24-1
[2] https://bit.ly/eer24-2
[3] https://bit.ly/eer24-3
You can contact Ruth if you would like to access them. You can also watch a video of Ruth talking about children’s agency here.
Ruth is a Cultural Researcher and Founder of Keep Your Shoes Dirty which specialises in helping organisations working in cross cultural international development and humanitarian sectors.
Contact: ruth@keepyourshoesdirty.org