I
Let me state my conclusion upfront: in the policy and management world I know best, human agency is the only genuinely global counternarrative I’ve encountered.
Because human agency is constrained differently across times, places, and conditions, it plays a more important role than hegemonic or universalized policy narratives like that for human rights. The human agency counternarrative persists — even as dominant policy narratives shift — precisely because it is not tied to any single macro-framework.
First, a working definition: human agency is “an individual’s capacity to determine and make meaning from their environment through purposive consciousness and reflective and creative action.” My version emphasizes reflexivity; others might stress self-determination or the capacity to act on one’s environment. Either way, I think the points that follow hold across most reasonable definitions.
II
To clarify what I mean by human agency, consider two examples — one from migration studies, one from research on child labor:
Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.
Schapendonk, J. (2021). “Counter moves. Destabilizing the grand narrative of onward migration and secondary movements in Europe.” International Migration: 1 – 14 https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12923
The relationship between young people and organized crime is complex and multifaceted. Young people are victims of acute marginalization, poverty and violence but they do have some agency over their decision making. The data from all studies illustrated how gangs offer young people ways to earn an income but they also provide social mobility, ‘social protection’ (Atkinson- Sheppard, 2017) and ‘street capital.’ In some instances, criminal groups offer young people ways to earn ‘quick and easy money.’ Thus, the young people are not devoid of agency, but their decision making should be considered within the context of restricted and bounded lives.
Atkinson-Sheppard, S. (2022). “A ‘Lens of Labor’: Re‐Conceptualizing young people’s involvement in organized crime.” Critical Criminology https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09674-5
III
With those examples in mind, let’s first turn to four positions often taken with respect to “human agency.”
There are those who think human agency is among core precepts around which to design large-scale systems involving humans, individually or collectively (think philosopher Kant and “human autonomy”). Others are more apt to focus on the individual or micro-level, where the agent acts under case-specific circumstances. Whether at the macro- or micro-levels, contestation abounds over the term, human agency, if only because of different optics on the micro from psychology, phenomenology, law, microeconomics, and more.
There are, however, two other levels and units of analysis, which are the ones I want to focus on with respect to human agency as the global counternarrative.
Far less mentioned than the micro and the macro are really-existing better practices for realizing human agency–in your or my definitions–that have evolved and over widely different cases. Then there are also the cases where macro-precepts are modified over contingency scenarios that vary subnationally, regionally or more “locally”. In both instances, human agency is better understood as an insistent counternarrative for moving away from the current dominant micro- and macro-level narratives of human action.
IV
From this vantage point, sweeping claims about human agency applying to or governing all cases are simply unworkable in a world shaped by highly variable system(s) patterns and highly variable local conditions.
Human agency as a counternarrative emerges from a run of different cases; it is not an a priori position from which to assert macro-principles or micro-experience. Human agency in this way becomes sufficiently granular to be actionable when applied and modified to the next case at hand. The limitation of staying at the macro and/or micro positions, e.g., “human rights apply uniformly to every single individual on this planet,” is that these positions degranularize the differentiated real-time conditions for taking action between whole system and single person.
A recent article, e.g., “questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term ‘resistance’ and contends that the term may at times obscure the proactive, enduring and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term ‘struggle’” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2158379X.2026.2681610). An earlier article on resistance, however, finds:
As is often noted, resistance is a term that seems impervious to stable definition. The term has a number of conceptual neighbours which are not quite its synonyms, and sometimes even function as its antonyms: dissent, rebellion, opposition, revolt, insurrection, revolution, protest, civil disobedience and conscientious objection. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01916599.2018.1473955; internal footnote deleted)
Oops, no ‘struggle’ in that list either.
Just as I distrust speculative metaphysics, so too I distrust discussions framed around macro-levels of terminological abstraction. Meanings are in the uses of the respective term and differentiated uses emerge across a run of events, situations, contexts, and applications. What looks like resistance to a state-imposed agenda in one place may look like the defense of still-evolving practices somewhere else. Any serious account of human agency as a counternarrative has to be that nuanced if it is to reflect the real work in transforming policy and management systems already shaped by macro-principles and few decision-makers.
The trouble with calls for big-T transformation is not just their gravitational pull toward abstraction. It’s that advocates for such transformations rarely admit the legitimacy of really-existing better practices that have evolved but still diverge from master plans. Better a billion small, practice-based just-transitions than the handful currently proclaimed in principle for the globe.
NB. See also When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for recasting policy and management in the Anthropocene (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2023) https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 