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Abstract

The concept of ‘agency’ is regularly put forward as an analytic tool to help understand, evaluate and act upon places around the world, through social development policies and programmes ostensibly designed to support or increase children’s agency. This article reflects on empirical research into children’s agency spanning a range of international contexts over two decades and offers new insights through critical engagement with a growing body of work on the ‘localisation’ of social development and humanitarian responses in international settings. It suggests that the largely normative ways in which the concept of agency is invoked as an analytic tool for understanding human experience universally effectively renders children’s agency invisible to us. This is because it is more a description of a particular discourse than something which actually helps us to understand and make visible children’s socio-culturally grounded ‘agentic practice’ from place to place. This article argues for new directions in research and practice to localise agency that are critical to the central commitments of interpretive social science. These new directions include (a) a new research agenda which can go beyond children’s ‘own perspectives’ to the discovery, description and analysis of agency in socio-cultural terms, to ensure it can function as an analytic tool for learning about socio-cultural phenomena which help animate local concepts of agency; and (b) the development of agency-related policies and programmes that are grounded in such locally situated concepts of agency developed through understanding local socio-cultural systems rather than externally derived socio-cultural assumptions about childhood and children’s agency.

Keywords

agency children culture localisation social development

Introduction

‘Agency’¹ has been defined as “an individual’s own capacities, competencies and activities through which they navigate the contexts and positions of their life-worlds fulfilling many economic, social and cultural expectations, while simultaneously charting individual/collective choices and possibilities for their daily and future lives” (Robson et al., 2007: 135). Agency is recognised to be something that is exercised rather than owned. It is not a ‘thing’ or characteristic and does not ‘belong’ to someone – a person cannot ‘have’ agency (Bell, 2012; Bell and Aggleton, 2012, 2013). Rather, it is a process that is exercised in the context of circumstances and can be observed as the things that people ‘do’. This is called ‘agentic practice’ (Maxwell and Aggleton, 2014), which refers to the ways in which agency is expressed, made visible and achieves its effects or outcomes.

As Tisdall and Punch (2012) assert, there is a normativity to focusing on agency which is prevalent in the literature. This normative stance makes it problematic if children’s agency is not viewed positively or is somehow ‘ambiguous’ because it does not align with established ideas about childhood and moral and social ideas about the kind of behaviour children should exhibit, the activities they should be engaged in, and the spaces and places deemed appropriate for them to inhabit (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012). At the same time, there is wide recognition that Childhood Studies has become a little stuck theoretically and lacks integration within policy and practice (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2011; Horton and Kraftl, 2006; James, 2005, 2010; Punch, 2016; Tisdall and Punch, 2012; Vanderbeck, 2008). Nonetheless, the concept of agency is regularly put forward as an analytic tool to help understand, evaluate and act upon places around the world, especially in ‘Majority World’ contexts, through social development policies and programmes ostensibly designed to support or increase children’s agency (Esser et al., 2016; Leonard, 2016; Oswell, 2013; Panelli et al., 2007; Punch, 2003; Stoecklin and Fattore, 2018).

This article seeks to help address this stagnation in agency-related theory and practice. It offers critical reflections on experiences of conducting empirical research into children’s agency spanning two decades in a variety of international contexts including Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia to help policymakers and practitioners improve local agency-related policies and programmes. These reflections are made in light of a growing body of work concerning the ‘localisation’ of social development problems and responses around the world (Guay and Rudnick, 2017a, 2017b; Miller et al., 2010b; Rudnick and Boromisza-Habashi, 2017; Rudnick et al., 2019). The argument that aid must be ‘localised’ in order to be effective has emerged largely in the field of humanitarianism and is now widely accepted across various sectors of the international system (Rudnick and Boromisza-Habashi, 2017; Rudnick et al., 2019). Importantly, this article follows Guay and Rudnick (2017b) in using the term ‘localisation’ to refer not simply to the adaptation of external approaches to local socio-cultural contexts (i.e. ‘tailoring to local needs’) but to how responses to problems are reflective of local socio-cultural systems in which they will be enacted by adopting processes for creating new approaches from local contexts (Guay and Rudnick, 2017a, 2017b; Rudnick and Boromisza-Habashi, 2017; Rudnick et al., 2019). For example, in the context of local-level security programming, Rudnick and Boromisza-Habashi (2017: 3) argue that: “Achieving this kind of change … requires a fundamental shift in perspective, away from the assumption of ‘security’ as a universally agreed set of conditions, toward the recognition of ‘security’ as socio-cultural phenomenon. In other words, it requires the recognition that meanings of security vary around the world, and that these meanings shape the actions people take, and the sense people make of the actions of others”.

In the same way, this article suggests that the current and largely normative ways in which the concept of agency is invoked as an analytic tool for understanding human experience universally is, in fact, more a description of a particular discourse rather than something which actually helps us to understand and make visible children’s socio-culturally grounded ‘agentic practice’ from place to place. When we treat agency as a socio-culturally grounded concept, reflective of situated socio-cultural expectations, it is possible to see that the privileging of certain cultural premises and social expectations in relation to agency actually obscures how agency is realised and practised by children, not only in our own socio-cultural contexts but also in other parts of the world (Rudnick et al., 2019). Consequently, the ways we use agency as an analytic tool are currently blinding us to actual social and cultural phenomena connected to children’s agency in different places where other sets of socio-cultural assumptions are shaping life. This effectively renders children’s agency invisible to us and this invisibility is problematic, both conceptually and practically, in terms of developing appropriate, effective, responsible and impactful policies and programmes in local contexts around the world (Rudnick et al., 2019).

Moving towards the ‘localisation’ of agency demands new commitments by researchers and practitioners, respectively. The first is a commitment to using research approaches which go beyond the exploration of children’s ‘own perspectives’ to discover, describe and analyse children’s agency in socio-cultural terms – not simply to help adapt the concept of agency to local contexts but to fundamentally ensure it can function as an analytic tool for learning about socio-cultural phenomena which help animate local concepts of agency (Rudnick et al., 2019). The second commitment refers to the development of agency-related policies and programmes that are grounded in situated concepts of agency developed through understanding from the vantage point of local socio-cultural systems rather than externally derived socio-cultural assumptions about childhood and children’s agency. Consequently, this article purposely engages in the literature beyond the field of Childhood Studies and uses the new insights gleaned to respond to theoretical and practical challenges with agency in the presently ‘stuck’ field of Childhood Studies. It sets out an agenda for the new directions in research and practice that are required to remedy these challenges through an understanding of agency in cultural terms and argues that such endeavours are, in fact, critical to the central commitments of interpretive social science.

There are three further substantive sections to this article. The first outlines some of the most pervasive problems with the way agency is currently conceptualised through a discussion about ‘normative’ (Tisdall and Punch, 2012) and ‘ambiguous’ (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012) theoretical strands of agency. This is followed, in the second section, by an exploration of the ways in which such conceptualisations pose problems when they are mobilised in the service of achieving positive social impacts for children and raise questions about the future of agency-related research and practice in general. The final section presents ideas about what these future directions might be and, in particular, how ‘situated theories’ of agency and ‘localised agency-related practices’ can help address the problems with relying on externally derived notions of agency when fostering children’s exercise of agency in locally responsible and impactful ways around the world. The article concludes with thoughts about how such future directions can ultimately render children’s agency visible in terms of revealing socio-culturally grounded understandings of their ‘agentic practice’.

What happens in theory? The problem with concepts of agency

Understanding ‘normative agency’

Normative understandings about agency have typically positioned it as something inherently individual and positive, with notions of children’s agency frequently underpinned by a particular cultural discourse in which Western ideals about children and childhood are prominent. The term agency most usually refers to a process of individual decision-making and action, whereby individuals are able to envisage different paths of action, decide among them and then make purposeful choices and transform these into desired actions and outcomes, individually or collectively with others, within the social, cultural, economic and political contexts specific to their daily lives (Bell, 2012; Bell and Payne, 2009; Esser et al., 2016; Gallacher and Kehily, 2013; Oswell, 2013; Petesch et al., 2005; Stoecklin and Fattore, 2018). It is, however, widely recognised that such decision-making and action are practised in different ways according to the different relationships that a person has with other people: for example, it may depend on a child having support or approval from others within their social networks to enable decisions to be made and actions to happen (Bell, 2012; Bell and Aggleton, 2012, 2013; Oswell, 2013; Robson et al., 2007). However, even the idea that agency is somehow ‘relational’ seems primarily concerned with the exercising of agency between individuals rather than the presence of relational decision-making and action in and of itself. This distinction is pertinent given the way conceptualisations of agency are rooted in a Western cultural discourse, which is premised on notions of identity that are inherently individualistic. This is in contrast to other cultural systems in which, for example, a relational model of society is prevalent, where notions of identity are primarily understood in and through connections and affiliations with others and, thus, decisions and actions are, in and of themselves, less individualised and more relational in their very nature.

Normative understandings of agency also position it in largely positive ways, in terms of a focus on decisions and actions which are considered to align with ideas about how children should behave (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012). Such ideas are firmly situated within a Western cultural discourse and are, as such, based on cultural assumptions that are not universal. While there is acknowledgement about the different forms agency can take (Bordonaro, 2012; Payne, 2012; Pells, 2012; Seymour, 2012; Verma, 2012), circumscriptions on children’s agency and the ‘thinning’ of agency (Klocker, 2007) can sometimes go unrecognised. Moreover, ‘agentic practice’ that does not conform to childhood ideals, referred to as ‘ambiguous agency’ (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012), can be entirely overlooked, as simply not constituting agency at all.

Understanding ‘ambiguous agency’

Agency is described as ‘ambiguous’ (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012) both when it is in stark contrast to normative conceptions based on moral and social ideas about the types of behaviours and practices that should be exhibited by certain people and when the exercise of agency occurs in ways which are contradictory to accepted social development programme goals and impact outcomes contingent on increasing agency. The concept of ‘ambiguous agency’ does much to highlight the theoretical distance between normative ideas about agency that are largely rooted in external cultural preferences and assumptions and those that are more closely aligned with local cultural understandings of agency: in other words, how social and cultural components of ‘agency’ are recognisable from place to place (Payne, 2012).

When agency is ‘ambiguous’ it is either viewed as problematic, because it is somehow detrimental to achieving the ‘right’ kind of agency, or it is not interpreted as agency at all but rather an expression of being incapable of agency, because the particular mode of exercising agency is not recognisable from other cultural perspectives. Take, for example, the ‘ambiguous agency’ of a child who is the household head responsible for looking after a number of younger siblings (Payne, 2012); an adolescent girl in Rwanda who chooses to have early sexual relationships with boys to gain the cultural value attached to proving fertility – or simply because she wants to; and an adolescent rural girl in Uganda who uses her relationship with an ‘auntie’ to quietly bring her parents around to her own way of thinking about a particular career direction which she thinks her parents will not approve of. In all cases, the exercising of agency does not align with the processes and outcomes expected by social development programmes. As such, it is effectively rendered invisible because it is being interpreted and assessed through external notions about what constitutes the exercising of agency without a culturally grounded understanding of the particular local roles, relationships and practices of children in relation to agency.

What happens in practice? Consequential effects of problems with agency

Encouraging the ‘right’ kind of agency

Over the recent years, the concept of agency has gained currency in social development practice, frequently being mobilised in the service of achieving positive social impact for children around the world. This typically occurs through the implicit encouragement of agency through policies and programmes more explicitly concerned with ‘empowering children’ and encouraging ‘children’s participation’ (Tisdall, 2016; Tisdall et al., 2014). When agency is deemed ‘ambiguous’, designing policies and programmes to promote or encourage children’s agency is a delicate activity. This is because the way in which children exercise, or want to exercise agency, is often in stark contrast to programme impact goals typically based upon moral and social ideals of childhood enshrined in international standards such as the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012; Edmonds, 2016; Payne, 2012; United Nations, 1989).

Consequently, normative conceptualisations of agency become especially problematic when operationalising it as a category for programmatic intervention to address social development problems. Many organisations, operating internationally and in unfamiliar cultural contexts, draw unwittingly on their own external assumptions about and preferences for a place, a people or a problem, which lead them to believe that a particular course of action is a good one (Edmonds, 2016; Rudnick et al., 2019). In such contexts, the concept of agency is applied by organisations in strategic ways towards policy and programme goals with an agenda of encouraging the ‘right’ kind of agency that is usually aligned with established and normative socio-cultural conceptions of childhood and how children should exercise agency (Bordonaro and Payne, 2012). Consequently, where agency is ambiguous, it is viewed as something which should be changed, improved upon or corrected through policy and programme interventions.

‘Best interests’ from whose perspective?

This emphasis on ‘correcting’ children’s agency is seen as synonymous with promoting the ‘best interests’ of the child, according to the CRC (Article 3; United Nations, 1989), which are themselves normatively defined (Harris-Short, 2003; Khadka, 2013; Wells, 2015). Therefore, when designing agency-related policies and programmes it is pertinent for organisations to ask themselves ‘what kind of agency is in the “best interests” of the child and according to whom?’ Programmes that encourage the ‘right’ kind of agency are frequently at odds with children’s own ideas about their lives and the kind of agency which enables them to achieve their own desires and outcomes. Such programmes include those that are ultimately (although not necessarily explicitly or with bad intent) attempting to normalise expressions of agency which do not align with ‘best interests’: for example, programmes replacing child household heads with adult carers who can undertake headship roles in their stead but potentially causing irreversible damage to sibling relationships in the process (Payne, 2012). They also include those that, paradoxically, encourage expressions of agency which can unwittingly result in actual social harm. An example of this might be a programme which encourages girls to behave in ways which are meant to be empowering for them, such as taking on leadership roles in communities, but where such behaviour could unintentionally lead to punishment and alienation because girls are encouraged to engage in activities that are not deemed appropriate according to the locally defined identities available for them. Consequently, when external cultural preferences and assumptions are used as a basis for decision-making and local action, for example, in terms of programme impact goal setting and design, it can, at best, result in programmes being ineffectual in terms of locally perceived and felt impact for children and, at worst, result in actual harm or risk of harm to the very populations organisations aim to help (Edmonds, 2016; Edmonds and Cook, 2014; Payne, 2012; Rudnick et al., 2019).

Therefore, agency-related programmatic interventions are better positioned when they increase the ability of children to exercise agency in a manner they choose, in relation to outcomes that they perceive as desirable or relevant in their lives (Bell, 2012; Bell and Aggleton, 2012) and in ways which are reflective of the local socio-cultural systems in which they will play out (Guay and Rudnick, 2017a, 2017b; Rudnick and Boromisza-Habashi, 2017). This kind of positioning calls into question the perennial use and advocacy of children’s ‘best interests’ as a hitherto largely unchallenged benchmark for programme practice with and for children in international contexts. It also means organisations must reconsider (a) the political, economic and social consequences of policies and programmes that support (rather than correct) and work with (rather than against) ‘ambiguous agency’; (b) the formulation of policy and programme impact goals, agendas and designs to better reflect locally grounded understandings of agency; and (c) the tools and approaches they use to create these new formulations which can best mobilise ‘local knowledge’ (Geertz, 1983) to create designs which emulate a local, rather than external, set of assumptions about how children’s ‘best interests’ might be realised through the promotion of locally relevant, meaningful and impactful ‘agentic practice’ in a sector which typically takes a more universal ‘best practice’ approach to programme development (Edmonds and Cook, 2014; Miller and Rudnick, 2012; Miller et al., 2010a; Rudnick et al., 2016; Rudnick et al., 2019).²

What new directions in research and practice? Towards the ‘localisation’ of agency

Generating situated theories of agency

The problems with agency, both conceptually and in terms of how the concept is operationalised in the service of social development policies and programme goals, expectations and designs, give rise to new directions in research, in particular, those which can develop situated theories of agency (Miller and Rudnick, 2008, 2010). Geertz (1983: 5) helpfully distinguishes between knowledge ‘of’ a place and knowledge ‘about’ a place, claiming that the former kind is essential for developing “understandings of understandings not our own”. Such ‘local knowledge’ can be generated through the use of interpretive methods and analytical frameworks that situate concepts of agency within relevant local cultural discourses and approaches: for example, ethnographic approaches that are able to uncover systems of meaning and practice that animate daily life for children by privileging the categories, explanations and interpretations of people themselves rather than viewing these things from an external frame of reference or set of assumptions about a people, place or social problem that are not, in fact, local (Leighter et al., 2013; Payne, 2012; Rudnick et al., 2019).

Importantly, and in contrast to previous calls for research with children to better understand issues from their ‘own perspectives’, this section outlines a research agenda that focuses on direct investigation of the cultural systems at work which ultimately ground these perspectives (Miller and Rudnick, 2008, 2010, 2012; Rudnick et al., 2019; Sprain and Boromisza-Habashi, 2013). This is because the theoretical underpinnings of agency, such as ‘autonomy’, ‘self-determination’ and individual freedoms (Sen, 1999), are not locally grounded concepts in and of themselves but products of an external cultural discourse about agency. For example, ‘autonomy’ is used to refer to a range of forms, meanings and practices around individualistic decision-making and action that are not necessarily resonant in relational cultural systems. If we simply investigate these theoretical underpinnings we learn only what children think about an external set of ideas about components of agency, rather than the local components themselves. Similarly, discussions about ‘social agency’ and ‘collective agency’ (Robson et al., 2007) are prevalent in the literature and it is widely accepted that agency is exercised in the context of broader social relations, expectations, influences and arrangements (Bell and Aggleton, 2013). Despite this, agency remains an inherently individualistic concept, bound up with notions of power and identity that are deeply connected to ideas about a ‘unique self’ in which people are understood as autonomous and individual actors, connected to other such persons by choice, not by nature, and best understood through their own set of unique and individual psychological and emotional characteristics, personal preferences, and experiences. These unrecognised cultural orientations towards modes of ‘personhood’ contribute to stagnation in moving conceptualisations of agency forward, something which can be addressed through the generation of ‘local knowledge’ about agency in terms of what is going on when children enact agency and what systems of meaning and practice are being animated when they do so.

Rudnick and Boromisza-Habashi’s (2017) Local Strategies Research (LSR), which draws on the Ethnography of Communication (EC) and has been applied in the context of human security, provides useful resources for such research agenda. LSR is fundamentally concerned with the study of situated practices in relation to phenomena in local socio-cultural contexts, which produce findings that can be useful for taking steps to localise international efforts to respond to conditions in such local contexts (for other examples, see Miller and Rudnick, 2008, 2010, 2012; Edmonds, 2016; Miller et al., 2010b; Rudnick et al., 2019).³ Guay and Rudnick (2017b: 18) assert that the localisation of problems, and solutions created to address them, must be “… explicitly informed by (if not actually derived from) local systems of practice and meaning”. Given this, research that can ground agency within local socio-cultural contexts can be achieved through approaches such as LSR and EC. These approaches invoke tools for cultural detection and interpretation, in particular, the use of some key cultural components to frame research about agency that are more universal and neutral than concepts such as ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-determination’ which may resonate less well in some cultural systems. For example, future research could usefully draw upon Carbaugh’s (2007) EC model of ‘cultural premises’ to understand children’s agency in socio-cultural terms. Cultural premises are “formulations of shared understanding about some of the fundamental dimensions of human experience and expression” (Carbaugh and Boromisza-Habashi, 2015: 549). They include premises of being or personhood (identities), premises of acting (communicative action), premises of relating or sociation (social relations), premises of feeling or emoting (experiencing and expressing affect) and premises of dwelling (living in a place). Using such premises, research could usefully focus on understanding how children currently exercise agency in their day-to-day lives – their ‘everyday agency’ (Payne, 2012) – and how they would like to exercise agency towards their own desired outcomes.

Developing localised agency-related practice

New directions in agency-related practice are also needed, in the shape of adjustments to, and development of, policy and programme goals, expectations and designs to promote and encourage children’s agency in ways which better reflect ‘local knowledge’, better respond to ‘ambiguous agency’ and addresses local notions of ‘best interests’ in different cultural contexts. Taking a locally grounded approach to agency-related practice means endeavouring to ensure that the policy and programme objectives being set are reflective of, and accountable to, the socio-cultural system of children and community members rather than being reflective of, and accountable to, cultural and social assumptions from somewhere else. This is important, both for ensuring that objectives are locally impactful – in other words, locally appropriate, relevant, effective, meaningful, responsible and ethical – and for making sure they do not inadvertently lead to unintended negative consequences and do harm with good intentions. Consequently, local understandings of agency that are more grounded in the particular socio-cultural logics about decision-making and action from place to place, will be helpful for shaping local action in terms of developing situated agency-related policies and programme practice in local contexts.

However, developing agency-related policy and programme goals and designs that are locally grounded can be a difficult task, mainly because recognising when our own interpretations and perspectives on the world are the products of our own deeply held cultural assumptions is not always apparent to us. This can be exacerbated when trying to address ‘ambiguous agency’ – that kind of agency that organisations seek to correct or improve upon in accordance with their own normative ideas about the kind of agency children should be exercising and the kind of childhood ideals they aspire to achieving amongst and for the children they work with. Nonetheless, local action that builds from situated understandings of agency, including agency which is in direct contrast to normative understandings, is best placed to ensure agency-related programmes are culturally relevant, meaningful and impactful. This is not to say that understanding, and acting upon, agency in socio-cultural terms necessarily means some form of cultural relativism must be at play and that localised ‘best interests’ must automatically be at odds with other interpretations. Indeed, taking a culturally relativist stance here would appear to only emphasise the distance between external and local interpretations rather than viewing socio-cultural understanding of the phenomenon (of agency in this case) as something that can actually and ultimately serve to inform a less dichotomised view of theory and action. Consequently, the point is not one of cultural relativism but rather of cultural awareness. The emphasis on more situated agency-related practice requires more reflection and scrutiny of all the cultural systems being brought to bear upon making sense of agency, not just those of child actors and local community members themselves, but those of the researcher, policymaker and programme practitioner, all of whom have the power to make decisions about and act upon the local (Rudnick, 2019, personal communication).

Consequently, when developing programmes to promote or encourage children’s agency, it will be useful for organisations to think carefully about what makes them confident that their ideas are good ideas, and good ideas for whom, in different contexts (Miller and Rudnick, 2012, 2014; Rudnick et al., 2019). For example, are proposed ‘corrections’ for children’s ‘ambiguous agency’ appropriate or even acceptable, not only from their own perspectives but from their own socio-culturally grounded realities too? Are organisations sure that their agency-related policies and programmes will not result in any harm (or risk of harm) to children, including that kind of harm which they are not necessarily in a position to recognise or understand given their own (external) cultural assumptions about what might constitute harm in a given place? Such a reframing ultimately involves a reconsideration of the ‘best interests’ driving programme impact goals, expectations and designs from the socio-cultural standpoint rather than the vantage point of ‘best practice’ programme models which have been used elsewhere (Edmonds, 2016; Edmonds and Cook, 2014).

Making children’s agency visible

Working at the nexus of research and practice, it is possible to see the consequential effects of concepts and theories as they play out in the context of people’s everyday lives through policy and programme practice (Edmonds, 2016; Payne, 2012; Rudnick et al., 2019). The concept of agency has been, and continues to be, mobilised in the guise of agency-related policies and programmes around the world. These can promote social impact agendas which intend to benefit children’s rights and opportunities to exercise agency but can, instead, either not achieve this in ways that are recognised by children themselves or, in fact, have the opposite effect in terms of causing unintended harms to children. Examples of policies and programmes, which are misaligned with children’s own realities, underscore the call for action outlined in this article. They bring into focus the fundamental obligations of scientific practice to ensure we act responsibly in terms of what we make available for others to use to help them create positive social change with and for children around the world.

Research on children’s agency is currently stagnated by a preoccupation with understanding children’s ‘own perspectives’ without sufficient grounding of these perspectives within the particular socio-cultural systems in which children live their lives and experience the array of agency-related social development policies and programmes ostensibly designed to encourage their agency. In this context, children’s agency is often rendered invisible to us because the privileging of certain cultural premises and social expectations in relation to agency actually obscure how this agency is realised and practised by children in other parts of the world. Consequently, the “… persistent gap/tension between the discourse of childhood studies and arenas of practice and policy” (Punch, 2016: 352) could be addressed through attention to the production of socio-culturally grounded agency-related concepts that better serve the development of situated local action (Leighter et al., 2013; Miller and Rudnick, 2008, 2010).

A research agenda which draws on more universal and neutral cultural components, such as Carbaugh’s ‘cultural premises’, is necessary to frame research about children’s agency in ways which can localise agency-related concepts. This is because they can be used to develop socio-culturally grounded understandings of agency, rather than others’ perspectives of agency from a cultural discourse that is not, in fact, local. The effect of such understanding, in the form of situated theories of agency, is to make visible actual socio-cultural phenomena connected to ‘agentic practice’. However, this kind of research agenda is not a sufficient response on its own. It is vital that the results of such work are used as resources to inform agency-related policies and programmes (Leighter et al., 2013). This is especially important to ensure objectives being set for action are reflective of, and accountable to, local socio-cultural assumptions, rather than external ones. It is only through this combination of situated theories of agency, together with the development of situated agency-related policies and programmes, that children’s agency can truly become visible and organisations can engage in meaningful, relevant and impactful work to foster ‘agentic practice’ in different places around the world.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Lisa Rudnick for her comments and suggestions in relation to this article and for her support in developing these arguments in the context of their wider work together.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Ruth Edmonds (PhD, University of London) is an ethnographer and social development consultant at Keep Your Shoes Dirty and honorary associate at the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships at the University of Edinburgh. She works at the nexus of generating “local knowledge” to inform programme design with organisations across the globe, including the United Nations, governments, international charities, trusts and foundations. She has fifteen years experience in applied ethnographic research, especially in relation to vulnerable children and families in wide-ranging research context in Africa, Asia and the United Kingdom and her research has appeared in online client reports, academic journals and edited books.

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Making children’s ‘agency’ visible: Towards the localisation of a concept in theory and practice

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

What happens in theory? The problem with concepts of agency

Understanding ‘normative agency’

Understanding ‘ambiguous agency’

What happens in practice? Consequential effects of problems with agency

Encouraging the ‘right’ kind of agency

‘Best interests’ from whose perspective?

What new directions in research and practice? Towards the ‘localisation’ of agency

Generating situated theories of agency

Developing localised agency-related practice

Making children’s agency visible

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

Notes

Author biography

References