Journal of Human Development

Vol. 8, No. 2, July 2007

Understanding Agency in Collective Action

FRANCES CLEAVER
Frances Cleaver is a senior lecturer at the Bradford Centre for International
Development, University of Bradford, UK
Abstract Participatory approaches to natural resource management
encompass ideas about the desirability of citizens actively engaging in
the institutions, policies and discourses that shape their access to
resources. Underpinning such approaches are assumptions about the
nature of human agency. Purposive individual action is seen as
instrumentally desirable as well as potentially radical and
transformatory.
Through
participation
in
collective
resource
management it is claimed that people can re-negotiate norms, challenge
inequalities, claim their rights and extend their access. This paper draws
on insights from theories of structuration, governmentality and gendered
empowerment to explore understandings of how individual human
agency shapes and is shaped by social relationships and institutions. It
outlines six factors that constrain and enable the exercise of agency for
different people; cosmologies, complex individual identities, the unequal
interdependence of livelihoods, structure and voice, embodiment and
emotionality. The paper concludes by considering some of the
implications for research and development interventions.
Key words:

Participation, Agency, Natural resource management

Introduction
The concept of agency is central to understandings of collective action, but
the assumptions made about the motivations and actions of individuals are
often problematic. In this paper I argue that conceptualizations of agency
as deliberate public participation in decision-making and collective action
are unhelpfully narrow. The paper synthesizes previous work of the author
and draws on a variety of theoretical positions to outline more complex
ways of understanding agency in collective action as deeply relational, and
constituted by routine practice as well as purposive action.
This paper evolved from thinking about the nature of individual and
collective action for the management of communal water resources, much
of it informed by common property resource management theory. Such
theory is underpinned by the assumption that institutions shape individual
ISSN 1464-9888 print/ISSN 1469-9516 online/07/020223-22 # 2007 United Nations Development Programme
DOI: 10.1080/14649880701371067

F. Cleaver
behaviour in collectively desirable ways. The participation of individuals in
negotiation and decision-making around collective arrangements is
assumed to positively influence rule-making and resource distribution.
Individuals are seen mainly as resource appropriators cleverly deploying
sociocultural norms and positions in maximizing their access to and use of
resources.
However, such theories have been criticized for deficiencies in their
modelling of the links between individual agency and collective action.
Heavily reliant on institutions as the analytic lens through which behaviour
can be understood, these theories are limited in their modelling of the
social/historical/political formation and location of individuals (Mollinga,
2001; Agrawal, 2005). Derived from methodologically individualist
assumptions, institutional theory relies heavily on concepts of the
boundedly rational individual who may exhibit behaviour on a spectrum
from saint to sinner, from rational egoist to conditional cooperator (Ostrom, 2005). While the interaction of endogenous variables
with individuals is recognized as shaping action, institutionalism (drawing
on rational choice theory, game theoretic models and evolutionary theory)
explains human behaviour primarily through varying responses to
incentives, rules and sanctions.
Concerns about unequal ability to shape decision-making are not
prominent in institutional theory, in which people may be categorized as
rule makers or rule followers (Ostrom, 2005). Such theories tend to model
agency as decision-making and are largely concerned with the choices that
people make rather than their ability to make those choices (Agrawal,
2005). Similarly, equity of outcome is not a major concern, the emphasis
being on the sustainable management of the natural resource, although
institutions are thought to work best when all those affected by their rules
are involved in decision-making.
In development policy and practice, resource managing institutions
are increasingly seen as vehicles of local governance, as manifestations
of community and as the channels through which equity goals can be
pursued. Purposive individual acts, particularly when aggregated as
collective action, are assumed to be both instrumentally useful and
potentially empowering. Local institutions such as Water User
Associations, supposedly foster the involvement of resource users in
management and, more broadly, the potentially transformatory articulation of their needs, the negotiation of claims to rights and resources.
The concept of water governance, linking levels of analysis from the
international to the individual, is being widely applied in the water
sector (Cosgrove and Rijsberman, 2000; WWAP, 2003) and linked to the
achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (DFID, 2005; United
Nations, 2005; WWC, 2006). There is, however, relatively little analysis
of how good water governance manifests at the micro level, how the
actions of individuals and communities contribute to it (Franks and
Cleaver, 2007).
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In recent post-tyranny thinking about participation there is a
perceived need to link the micro-politics of participation to good
governance more broadly and to the workings of the state. This leads to
a concern with promoting a radical participatory form of citizenship
(Hickey and Mohan, 2004), in which rights can be claimed from below.
While asserting that such citizenship works best within the context of a
wider societal project of social justice, this perspective optimistically views
individual agency as the range of socio-political practices through which
people can increase control over resources and extend their status. (The
extension of the capacity to exercise individual choice is also a central
tenet of the capability approach with which other papers in this volume
are concerned.) Important to such post-tyranny thinking are concepts of
new spaces and new rules for the promotion and articulation of such
citizenship and rights (Cornwall, 2004; Kesby, 2005).
The underlying assumptions made by policy-makers about individual
agency are crucial to the effectiveness of policy (Greener, 2002). In the
case of water, the active participation of marginalized people in
institutions for collective management is assumed to ensure equity goals.
With equity concerns in mind, in this paper I draw on a range of
theoretical insights to explore better understandings of the numerous
ways in which individual human agency is shaped and exercised in respect
to collective resource management. In so doing I touch upon some
interesting dilemmas: Why are some individuals better placed to shape
public decision-making than others and what are the differential costs and
benefits of such participation? Is non-participation an active exercise of
agency or a symptom of crippling structural constraint? By what authority
is collective action legitimized, individual claims to resources asserted and
maintained, representations of others made? Critically, how do we
understand the balance between the individual capacity for autonomous
action and the essentially relational nature of exercising agency in the
social world? And finally, what are the links between the capacity to
exercise agency and the effects of that agency?

Theoretical insights
In this section I draw on a selection of theoretical approaches to enrich
thinking about the relationship between individuals, institutions and the
outcomes of collective decision-making over natural resources. Although
eclectic, these theoretical perspectives commonly emphasize the need to
place understandings of agency in wider contexts and frameworks, and
think beyond the assumption of agency only as purposive action. The
following section then draws heavily on the ongoing debate in social theory
about the balance between agency and structure, between enablement and
constraint. It supplements this debate with points drawn from contemporary theorizing about governmentality (Dean, 1999; Agrawal, 2005) and
about gendered empowerment (Kabeer, 2000; Kesby, 2005).
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Enablement and constraint

In social theory, agency is seen as the capability, or power to be the
originator of acts and a distinguishing feature of being human. Reflexivity
and the ability to act purposively commonly feature in definitions of
agency. For example, Weber characterized human action as shaped by a
rationality consisting of self-consciousness, reflection, intention, purpose
and meaning (Rapport and Overing, 2000). Agency is commonly
conceptualized as relational; it does not exist in a vacuum but is exercised
in a social world in which structure shapes the opportunities and
resources available to individuals, in which appropriate ways of being
and behaving are not simply a matter of individual choice. While most
social theorists embrace the duality of individuality and relationality, there
are varying emphases on the balance between enablement and constraint.
Debate concerns the extent to which the exercise of agency is generative of
individual transformations and social change, and to how far it is subjected
to the discipline imposed by social norms and sanctions.
Giddens (1984) and Long (1992, 2001) emphasize the variation
resulting from the exercise of agency. They recognize the structural
constraints within which agents operate, the non-reflexive nature of much
everyday practice, and the intended and unintended effects of individual
actions. However, they are largely optimistic about the possibilities of
individual agency, seemingly assuming that the exercise of reflexive agency
and the conscious deployment of various forms of capital by the individual
can overcome the constraints of habitus (Greener, 2002). For example,
Long suggests that the individual actor has the capacity to process social
experience and to devise ways of coping with life, even under the most
extreme forms of coercion (1992, p. 22) and that agency is about the
ability to choose levels of enrolment in the projects of others and to
exert influence to enrol others in ones own project. Thus, even the
compromise of partial enrolment is seen as a strategic positioning of
actors in response to conflicting priorities and critical events, often
involving deferral, accommodation, negotiation, selective appropriation
and distantiation or absenteeism (Arce and Long, 2000, p. 3). Giddens
(1996), mostly writing of contemporary western society, emphasizes the
ability of agents to respond to the challenges that society throws at them,
to confront and deal with risk.
Bourdieu (1977) emphasizes how strongly habitus (a set of
dispositions that incline agents to act and react in different ways) shapes
agency and the ways in which hegemonic elites shape habitus. For him
individuals have agency, but the kind of agency they have is partially
prescribed by the culture of which they are members. Archer (2000)
similarly emphasizes the constraining effects of culture and the difficulties
of acting beyond the roles in which society places us, while Douglas (1987)
expounds the many ways in which social institutions (the accepted ways of
thinking and doing) constraint us, often invisibly. However, crucially, for
Bourdieu agency is not simply comprised of reflexive action, but strongly
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constituted by non-reflexive practice; agents are potentially capable of
generating change through both purposive acts and routine practices
(Greener, 2002).
The co-existence of factors of enablement and constraint is a tension
addressed by theorists exploring the ways in which individual agents are
formed and explaining the intermittence and unpredictability of change
effected through agency (Henriques et al., 1984; Mc Nay, 2000). Agrawal
(2005) favours the term subjects over agents for its productive
ambiguities; for him it implies a notion of both creative agents and
subjected individuals. Mc Nay rejects a Foucauldian over-emphasis on
subjection of the individual in favour of an analysis, drawing on
Bourdieu, which shows how creative agents are sometimes able to
overcome constraint and generate transformational change. She emphasizes though that self-conscious creativity is not generalizable but
a complex and evanescent feature of action (Mc Nay, 2000, p. 22). The
multiple and dynamic (and potentially contradictory) positioning
of agents is much emphasized in these writings, with Mc Nay suggesting the need for a more precise and varied account of agency to
explain the differing motivations and ways in which individuals and
groups struggle over, appropriate and transform cultural meaning and
resources (2000, p. 4).
Development policy relating to participation in natural resource
management tends towards the optimistic Giddenesque approach to
agency, emphasizing the instrumental, empowering and transformatory
effects of individual participation in collective action. Institutional theory
assumes that behaviour is either rationally strategic or learnt; that people
choose either to cooperate or to free ride on the collective good. In this
paper I illustrate some of the multiple ways in which agency is exercised
through social relationships, as well as the constraints that limit the
opportunities, especially for poor people, to exercise agency.

Allocative and authoritative resources

Collective action for natural resource management is enacted through a
variety of bureaucratic and socially embedded institutions. In institutional
processes people draw on various forms of authority as sources of
legitimation; the ability to exercise authority (in the name of the
collectivity) is implied in understandings of representative local institutions for resource management
The individual exercise of agency is tied into relations of power and
authority. We have seen how, in much social theory, to be an agent (to
exercise agency) depends on the ability to act, to choose a course of action
(or inaction), the capability to make a differencein sum, to exercise
some sort of power. For Giddens, individuals may do this by accessing and
deploying various sorts of allocative or authoritative resources. Using the
concept of resources as the material and non-material properties of social
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systems from which human interactions are derived, Giddens (1984), in
his theory of structuration, distinguishes between allocative (raw
materials, means of production, produced goods) and authoritative
resources (organization of social time/space, chances for self-development,
relationships between people). Put simply, allocative resources relate to
command over things, while authorative resources imply command over
people. For Giddens, resources are the media through which power is
exercised and resources are structured properties of social systems,
drawn upon and reproduced by knowledgeable agents in the course of
interaction (Giddens, 1984, p. 15). Human agents make rules that
structure the deployment of resources; the patterning of command over
resources in turn shapes the actions of agents. However, as suggested in
the discussion above, such power to act is constrained by social structures;
the inequitable patterning of relations that ensures some individuals (by
virtue of their social position) are better placed to deploy resources, to
shape rules, to exercise power, than others.
The concept of authoritative and allocative resources, adapted to the
collective management of natural resources, encompasses general
relationships of power, structures of inequality, rules of social life and
(unequal) access to the physical resource. This raises questions about who
is able to command material and non-material resources to the benefit or
detriment of others? For those with the least command over resources,
who represents them, and what patterning of social relationships results
(Hickey and Bracking, 2005)?

Governmentality, plurality and regimes of practice

Recent writing on governmentality (Dean, 1999; Agrawal, 2005) also
highlights the need to analyse the multiple relations of power and
authority implicated in the exercise of agency. For these writers, drawing
heavily on Foucauldian notions of government as the conduct of
conduct, power is often exercised through taken-for-granted every day
interactions, through embodied regimes of practice. Such regimes are
layers of institutionalized practices, the routinized and ritualized ways in
which we do things in certain places and at certain times (Dean, 1999).
Governmentality is thus the study of the organized practices through
which we are governed and through which we (consciously and
unconsciously) govern ourselves. From this perspective, participatory
approaches in natural resource government become a technology of
government.
For these writers the aim is to uncover the taken-for-granted nature
of regimes of practice, to illuminate the ways in which individuals
problematize their own conduct in order to better govern it. In order to
do this they suggest the need to think about the linkages between
government, authority, politics and questions of self, identity and person
(Dean, 1999, p. 12). Agrawal (2005) ambitiously attempts to do this in his
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study of the collective governance of forest resources in India. He places
individual agency in a wider context by illustrating the linkages between
the policies of decentralized local government, the emergence of new
localized regulatory communities (village level forest councils) and the
transformation of perceptions and actions of some of those environmental subjects who participate in community decision-making.
Agency is exercised in a variety of ways in multiple arenas. The
concept of regimes of practice central to governmentality implies a
plurality of spheres within which interactions take place. Dean suggests
that there is a plurality of governing agencies and authorities, of aspects of
behaviour to be governed, of norms invoked, purposes sought and of
effects, outcomes and consequences (Dean, 1999, p. 19). Such complexity
may encompass pluralities of scale as in Agrawals study and multiple
arenas of overlapping networks within which interactions around
governance and self-governance are formed. The concept of plurality
finds direct echoes in current thinking in natural resource management
and has relevance both for the opportunities and constraints for individual
action.
Thinking through the nature of complexity of the collective management of water, Merrey et al. (2007) identify three inter-related aspects of
plurality. Polycentric governance involves a various actors and organizations at all levels, institutional pluralism relates to the multiplicity of rules
and procedures applicable to a specific issue (e.g. the congruent modern
and traditional laws governing water in many African countries) and
multifunctionality refers to the range of different uses to which water is
put (and the associated variety of values attached to these by different
actors). Such analyses of pluralism well indicate the complexity of arenas
in which individual agency is exercised.
In previous work on the collective management of water and land I
have outlined the concept of institutional bricolage; the piecing together
through conscious action and non-reflexive practice of institutional
arrangements from existing norms, practices and relationships (Cleaver,
2002). I have presented bricolage as a sort of institutional do-it-yourself,
rather than a more explicitly conscious and rational form of institutional
engineering or design. Implied in the concept of bricolage is a multiplicity
of potential resources to draw on and a variability in the capacity of
individuals to act as bricoleurs.
Positions vary as to whether plurality offers opportunity or constraint.
Ostrom (2005) and Merrey et al. (2006) seem to imply that plurality in the
form of polycentric channels for resource governance provides scope for
more negotiability, flexibility, room for manoeuvre. This point is
reinforced by those thinking about the potential for new spaces to
provide sites for the renegotiation of norms and inequitable social
relationships (Cornwall, 2004; Kesby, 2005). However, Odgaard (2002)
and Maganga (2002), writing of plural systems for the governance of land
and water resources in Tanzania, suggest that these serve to reproduce
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inequalities in multiple ways, to consolidate the marginalization of the
weak.

Effects of exercising agency

The working of power through plural institutional settings shapes the
effects of agency, the ability of individuals to effect significant difference in
their lives. Power may be exercised and accepted both consciously and
unconsciously; the self-disciplining of agents; their acceptance of
relations of inequality, may ensure the reproduction of power through
everyday acts and relationships; Self-disciplining actors often enrol
themselves into the projects of others (Kesby, 2005, p. 2047). While
several writers emphasize the everyday reproduction of relationships of
power, there is also a common assumption in the literature that the
exercise of agency is not just about choice but about challenging power
relations and the ways that things are commonly done. Thus reflexive
agents supposedly can question norms, challenge inequitable distribution
of resources, claim and extend their rights. For these writers, agency is
seen as empowering, and is potentially transformatoryalthough, as Mc
Nay (2000, p. 5) notes, the individual and innovative ways in which
individuals respond may hinder as well as catalyse social change.
Not all choices are equal, not all agents are equally placed to make
them and similar actions may have very different outcomes. Agrawal
(2005) shows how apparently equitable forest rules have unequal impact
on different people, who also respond variously to them because of the
opportunities and constraints offered by their subject positions. In the
communities he studied, the forest guards detected and reported women
and harijans most frequently for violating the forest rules; such offenders
were not only more frequently detected, but they paid their fines more
promptly than offending high-caste neighbours. In this case we could
speculate that the perception by others of the social position of agents,
and their dependence on good reputation and relations of patronage,
shapes their rule-following behaviour.
For an acknowledgement that not all choices are equal we turn to
gender theorists. For Kabeer the issue is not so much whether an
individual can choose to act in a particular circumstance, but about how
much control they have to make strategic decisions that shape their lives.
She distinguishes between first-order and second-order choices; the
former referring to decisions fundamental to the shape of a persons life,
the second to choices that affect quality of life but do not constitute its
defining parameters (Kabeer, 2000, p. 28). Importantly, for Kabeer, the
exercise of agency is not just about potential ability to exercise choice, but
about the real effects these choices can have. In participatory natural
resource management, the participation of individuals in itself is assumed
to lead to benefits to them, although this is demonstrably often not the
case.
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Unpacking agency in natural resource management

Let us now draw on some of these theoretical debates and insights to
explore how agency is enabled and constrained in the collective management of natural resources. The following sections cannot be a comprehensive illumination of the workings of agency, but they offer assorted
snapshots of the complexity of the exercise of such agency in social life.
Through these illustrations I aim to explore some of the tensions in the
relationship between agency, collective action and the achievement of
equitable outcomes.

Moral world views

As we have seen, social theorists often emphasize how much of our daily
conduct is taken for granted, how many of our interactions so routinized
that we do not often subject them to discursive scrutiny. One of the
debates that arises is the extent to which such actions can be made visible
and be questioned; when and how can the norms be negotiated?
Institutionalist theories of common property resource management err
towards the strategic; they place great faith in the ability of people to
bargain and negotiate, to strategically respond to incentives and to
position themselves in relation to collective norms.
A body of work in natural resource management documents complex
and wide-ranging world views within which people, both consciously and
unconsciously, place themselves and their actions (Adams et al., 1997;
Mosse, 1997; Cleaver, 2000). In many African countries a form of moral
ecological rationality links peoples perceptions of their own actions with
the natural and supernatural worlds. For example, in villages where I
worked in Zimbabwe, people perceived that rainfall, the associated fertility
of the land and the ability to secure livelihoods was critically affected by
proper observation of custom, the showing of respect to elders and the
levels of cooperation between people. Negotiations over access to
resources, and the rules and sanctions deployed in the management of
land and water was strongly shaped by such moralecological rationality.
These often unspoken cosmological assumptions influenced individuals
willingness to abide by collective decisions and to broadly comply with
unwritten norms of resource use.
Moral world views often include strongly gendered and socially
stratified ideas about proper behaviour and the rightful place of
individuals of different social identities. A notable aspect of such
cosmologies (which may include ideas about sacred places, spirit homes
and a direct relationship of people with ancestors) is that they link
proper ways of individuals behaving in the social world with effects in
the natural and supernatural ones. In the Zimbabwean case mentioned
above, moralecological rationality was often invoked by elders to
explain drought and deforestation as related to the unacceptable
behaviour of young people (e.g. to condemn young women having
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terminations of pregnancy or boys for not respecting their fathers). It
was also referred to frequently to bemoan the lost social solidarity of the
past, linked to a lost environmental fecundity, a theme strongly reflected
in invocations of similar world views in the Usangu basin in Tanzania
(SMUWC, 2001).
But such socially embedded views can be subject to some discursive
scrutiny and to manipulation. Mercy Dikito-Wachtmeister studied the
reasons for womens participation or non-participation in village water
committees in Zimbabwe. She notes womens accounts of how belief in
witchcraft shaped their unwillingness to speak out, to disagree with others
in matters of water management. She also observed that while fear of
witchcraft seemed real to a majority of participants, she suspected some of
strategically using this belief to excuse themselves from onerous and timeconsuming participatory decision-making. Thus, in reference to a
disagreement about whether a borehole should be used for garden
watering or not, she contrasts the views of two women. The first
respondent claimed: [] I prefer to keep quiet because there are people
here who use lots of witchcraft. If you exchange words with these people it
makes their magic work on you. The best thing is to keep quiet, and not
give them a chance (Dikito-Wachtmeister, 2000, p. 219). Another
respondent however says of the water committee members: I think
some of them will want to pretend that the reason they do not do their
duties is because of fear of witchcraft, when they are either lazy, or cant
because of other responsibilities. Witchcraft has become an excuse for
everything. [] They use it to explain everything that has not worked out
well or to justify their lack of participation in community things (DikitoWachtmeister, 2000, p. 219).
It is often unclear where the boundaries of reflexivity are; when and to
what extent people can choose to negotiate the norms. At these rather
blurred boundaries there may be room for creative adaptation to occur.
For example, in the Usangu plains in southern Tanzania in-migrant
pastoralists sought some kind of social acceptance from indigenous Sangu
agriculturalist neighbours by participating in Sangu ceremonies. They
sought blessing for the well-being of their cattle from the keeper of an
important Sangu shrine, they contributed to ceremonies to ensure good
rain and good grass in the plains. The in-migrant pastoralists, little
integrated into local society, were nevertheless relatively rich in the
resources needed to participate in these ceremonies; making contributions of grain, chickens and even cattle (SMUWC, 2001). So cultural beliefs
may be accepted by many, partially negotiated by some, and provide an
authoritative resource for others.

Complexity of individual identities

People do not exercise property rights over natural resources simply as
resource appropriators, but as people with rich social identities.
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Individual identities and associated motivations are complex and multilayered, as are the channels through which resources are accessed.
Plurality manifests in agents themselves.
For example, evidence from a number of countries (Odgaard, 2002;
Rao, 2003; Arora-Jonsson, 2005) suggests the complexity of identities and
relationships through which womens land rights are exercised. Women
may claim rights to natural resources as legal and equal citizens but also
through their subject positions as daughters, wives, mothers as members
of a particular caste or ethnic group. To these women, living their lives
within marriages and kin groups, exercising their agency through public
institutions may not always be the preferred option. In Arora-Johnsons
study of womens activisim in forest communities in Sweden and India,
she found that in both places women saw forest issues as inseparable from
social relationships and wider village issues. Change required the exercise
of agency in both domestic and public spheres.
An account of irrigation management in Nepal shows how some
women drew on their family and gendered identities rather than those as
active citizens, to secure water. Constrained by prevailing ideas about
proper gender roles, some women did not participate in the irrigation
association but secured their water partly through the public participation
of male members of their own households, partly through the patronage
of kin and partly through stealing and cheating. They justified their nonparticipation by referring to gendered norms; the inappropriateness of
them attending meetings held in the evening, the demands of their
domestic work (Zwarteveen and Neupane, 1996).
Approaches to participatory natural resource management tend to
overlook the complexity of individual identities to categorize people into
taxonomic groups, and to assume motivations linked to the labels of
farmers, women, pastoralists, irrigators, and so on. Institutionalist
understandings of collective action are also rule-orientedthey see the
creation of collective rules and the sanctions applied to rule-breaking as
essential to effective action. But how much capacity do people with
different social identities have to exercise agency in respect of these rules?
The agency of individuals is clearly exercised in relation to the perception
by others of them. Dikito-Wachtmeister (2000) notes the tendency in the
villages she studies for more powerful women to be excused from rule
following; examples included someone associated with the ruling party, a
woman who employed such vile language that people were afraid to
confront her, and a well-off woman who administered the church fund for
people in misfortune. Social placement of an individual critically affects
their ability to bend collective rules.

Unequal interdependence of connected livelihoods

Participatory approaches to common property resource management tend
to be based on the assumption that groups of individuals can collectively
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manage resources on the basis of some sort of equality derived from
common livelihood interests. Indeed, interrelatedness is seen as fundamental to the building of social capital, the moulding of social norms, the
generation of collective action and, hence, the further building of relations
of trust and cooperation (Pretty, 2003).
This assumption of equality of interest of agents is underpinned by
the myth that people following similar practices (in relation to natural
resource use and management) may be equally placed to shape these
practices. This clearly is not the case. For example, studies analysing
gender relations show us that even where men and women in a household
or community perform similar tasks and have similar interests in the
resource, decision-making power, the ability to mobilize authoritative and
allocative resources, and the outcomes of this ability, may be skewed.
The unequal interdependence of people with similar livelihood
interests is complex. Discussing indigenous forest management in Uganda,
Nabanoga (2005) notes very similar knowledge about trees, and practices
of tree management between men and women. However, she shows how
prevailing cosmologies, myths that women are not significantly involved in
tree protection and use, and land tenure arrangements that favour men
mean that men dominate in decisions about tree planting (even of
womens tree planting). Similarly, participation in tree-related activities
often depends on social status, and the outcomes confer status; mens
ownership of fig trees was historically an important status symbol, and
ability to produce bark cloth in quantity conferred social status. By contrast
the production of handicrafts from palm trees, and the collection of
particular wild vegetables, conferred social status on women but were
considered only the last resort of the poorest and unmarried men
(Nabanoga, 2005).
Rao (2003), however, usefully points out that the exercise of agency
involves mutuality and interdependence as well as relations of domination
and subordination. Indeed, the two are mutually implicated. Common
interests are embedded in relations of unequal interdependence, often
involving arrangements of patronage. For many poorer and subordinate
individuals and groups, access to resources is primarily exercised through
inequitable social arrangements. Thus Joshi cites a dalit woman from
India, excluded by higher caste neighbours from equitable access to water,
explaining why she will not object, even in the context of a gender-focused
participatory development intervention: My neighbours are important to
me, no matter what they do. I need their support for my familys daily
existence. (Joshi et al., 2003, p. 2)
Positions of relative power do not imply unfettered ability to exercise
agency. Recent research explored the interaction between individuals,
community-based workers and local institutions at in participatory
development initiatives in Tanzania and South Africa. Although the
community-based workers were structurally relatively privileged, they
frequently expressed frustration that community members did not play
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their part properly, absented themselves, declined to cooperate, gave
false information, and thus constrained the effective exercise of agency by
the workers (Understanding Community Action, 2006).
A similar point about skewed interdependence is made in Masakis
study of caste-based management of irrigation infrastructure in Nepal
(Masaki, 2004). The paper chronicles attempts by members of the
labouring caste to exercise both individual and collective agency in
reshaping customary labour obligations to be less onerous to them. But
while the landowning elite need the lower caste villagers as labourers on
their irrigated land, the relationship is one of unequal interdependence as
the labourers are unlikely to survive at all without the patronage of the
landowners. Relations of interdependence do offer the possibility of
negotiation of rights but such interdependence exists alongside structural
inequality. Immediate livelihood imperatives, combined with unequal
authoritative and allocative resources, may shape the exercise of agency in
directions productive of social harmony and conflict avoidance, rather
than effective resistance or explicit negotiation of rights.
Relations of mutuality are plural in their manifestations. In much
institutionalist theorizing, the focus on resource users and institutional
fora means that the multiple locations of decision-making and the
shaping of norms are often overlooked. In particular, intra-household
dimensions of the shaping of agency and decision-making are often
ignored. Bolt and Bird (2003) schematize the layers of overlapping
factors (gender, age, birth order, physical ability and relationship to
head of household) that may disadvantage individuals within households; rendering them less likely to shape decisions and to access
resources. Livelihoods research in Tanzania showed how even entrepreneurial women were restricted in their agricultural business activities
by the location of their marital home and expectations of wifeliness
(SMUWC, 2001), while young women unhappily excluded themselves
from volunteering for training as Village Activators, citing the influence
of elders as key restrictions on their choice of social and economic roles
(Cleaver and Kaare, 1998).

Structure and voice

Social theorists debate the extent to which structural placement shapes
the ability to exercise agency, even shapes the person it is possible to
become. Much thinking about the participatory management of natural
resources assumes that if the forum for decision-making is local and the
rules for access and distribution are fair, then all will (potentially) be able
to participate and to benefit. We have already seen above how this was
not the case in Agrawals forest communitiesdespite local decisionmaking arrangements and fair rules, patterning of class caste and
gender shaped engagement and outcomes for different people (Agrawal,
2005).
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F. Cleaver
The ways in which structure shapes agency are numerous but here I
will concentrate on illustrating ways in which structures of gender and
class shape the ability of individuals to articulate in public fora and so to
influence the management of resources.
The literature on participatory natural resource management is
remarkably silent about the effects of structure on norms of articulation,
the empowering or disempowering effects of participating through a
representative at a meeting, and whether strategic mutedness is evidence
of the conscious exercise of agency or merely another manifestation of the
hegemonic inequitable social structures. Post-tyranny literature on
participation and gendered empowerment, however, does tackle the
perplexing issue of voice. It recognizes both that participatory spaces are
imbued with power relations that may result in the conscious and
unconscious self muting of disadvantaged people (Kesby, 2005) and is
optimistic about the possibilities of creative participatory methodologies
for disrupting business as usual and facilitating the articulation of
alternative views (Cornwall, 2004).
Hierarchies among women, concepts of proper behaviour and
virilocal marriage arrangements constrain the agency of some. One young
woman explains constraints on her participation in water management to
a researcher: I cannot be seen to be taking a lead role at meetings
attended by older women as this could be perceived as being disrespectful.
I am a young woman who has just been married here for a few years, so I
cannot be speaking often and taking a lead in these things. If you are still
young and have young children like me, nobody takes you seriously,
nobody respects you (Dikito-Wachtmeister, 2000, p. 221).
However, we have already seen how moral rationalities, concepts of
the right way of doing things, may unwittingly shape peoples agency, but
may also be consciously deployed and negotiated. Dikito-Wachtmeister
(2000) postulates the transfer of household bargaining models, based on
negotiations of proper gender roles, to the more public domain. The
women she studies used the strategy of buttering (or flattering) men,
both in the household and in public, and invoking gendered norms of
desirable behaviour to avoid water management work. DikitoWachtmeister documents a meeting in which women consciously and
deliberately buttered men, through praise and positive reinforcement of
their manliness, in order to persuade one particular man to take on a
water management role. They adopted a humble demeanour in keeping
with tradition and respect when doing this. The man then asserted his
intention to be strong and strict in the role. Dikito-Wachtmeister notes the
strategic use on other occasions of gendered norms of mutedness; by
deliberate and collective non-contributions to a meeting, women were
able to gain the concerned attention of the chairman and an invitation to
elucidate their views.
The unequal co-existence of empowerment and subordination in
gendered negotiations and expression of voice is common. Tukai (2005)
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documents an attempt to empower women in a pastoralist community in
Tanzania through a participatory water project. The aim of promoting
womens role as active citizens was partially achieved; they increased their
representation on the village council, on the water committee and claimed
greater confidence in discussions both at village and household level.
However, within the timescale of the project, their increased capacity to
exercise agency and voice could not counter the wider relations of
patriarchy in which they were embedded. Despite their gains in citizenship, they could not secure access to water on better terms with men.
A concern with gendered participation and voice is often translated
into the counting of numbers of women participating. But this throws little
light on the gendered dynamics of meetings, or on gendered norms of
articulation and who they privilege or oppress. Research in Tanzania
showed women participating in village meetings on a different basis to
men. Although meetings followed accepted patterns, with men sitting
separately from women, and women speaking less, this could not be
mistaken for lack of participation on the part of women. Female
informants suggested that they deputed one or two women, known for
their eloquence, to speak for them. These were not formal representatives
and might be decided upon during the course of the meeting, according to
need. But in this way women felt they could have their voice heard. At a
recent village meeting there had been a debate about how to use surplus
water funds. Individual men had spoken in favour of funding a beer drink
and feast, women had deputed their speakers to argue in favour putting
the money towards providing another water source. The triumph of water
over beer illustrated the potential effectiveness of the womens way of
articulating their interests through representatives (Cleaver and Kaare,
1998).
Space and location shapes the ability to exercise agency through
voice. In Arora-Jonssons study of forest activism, women in India pushed
for formalization of their group as they saw this as necessary for greater
recognition and bargaining power, whereas in Sweden it was by
maintaining informality that women felt able to sustain a forum for
collective articulation (Arora-Johnsson, 2005).

Embodiment
Accessing and using natural resources is often a very physical activity, and
the participation in decision-making involves embodied presentations of
self. And yet the enacting of participatory natural resource management
through corporeal human conduct is often neglected in analyses; little
attention is given to how embodiment enables and constrains active
participation (Jackson, 1998). Bourdieu emphasizes the body in his
discussion of the habitusfor him, the habitus moulds the human
physique and the human body is an important signifier in social
interaction, expressing social status and power as much as communicative
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F. Cleaver
intent. Deportment, ways of dressing and speaking are produced by and
reproduce social structure (King, 2005, p. 223). Dikito-Wachtmeisters
example of the humble demeanour of women imploring a man to take on
a role of responsibility and management illustrates this point.
It could be argued that able-bodiedness is key to the effective exercise
of agency in participatory natural resource management. Public participation, accessing resources, and interacting with others is shaped by physical
capabilities; the healthy and able-bodied are most likely to be able to
exercise effective agency in these respects. Research in Tanzania showed
poor families that suffered multiple constraints on their physical ability to
produce livelihoods, to travel and to engage socially, gradually dropped
out of associational life and became more and more limited in the ways in
which they could use resources. Constraints on able-bodiedness and
mobility ranged from diseases and disablement to the limitations imposed
by caring for sick relatives, large numbers of very small children or carrying
a difficult pregnancy. People suffering such problems were unable to
contribute to collective action, attend meetings or social events or pay fees
to clubs and associations. They were also unable to access distant
resources, relied on very local supplies of grass, wood and water, or had to
pay to buy these in small quantities (Cleaver, 2005). In other words, they
were unable to fully exercise their agency in the maintenance of their
livelihoods. Embodiment and agency are recursively linked. Campbell and
Jovchelovitch (2000) also note the fact that people who lack the power to
shape their life courses in strategic ways are significantly less likely to be
healthy, a factor that can create a vicious cycle of disempowerment, and
poor health.
Additionally, even for healthy, mobile, able-bodied people, embodiment creates some challenges to the exercise of agency. In a recent project
researching community-driven development in Tanzania and South Africa,
community-based workers were asked to keep reflective diaries chronicling their work. The diaries detailing home visits, community mobilization and training activities are characterized by daily references to the
workers own physical state (being hungry, tired, hot, cold or wet) and
the detrimental effects of this on their activities. The diaries illustrate well
the ways in which both strategic action and everyday practice is shaped by
the experiences of our embodied selves (Understanding Community
Action, 2006).
Not all agents have equal command over their physical selves. Natural
resources are often accessed through deploying the labour of others;
children and junior wives sent to fetch water, herdsmen employed to take
cattle to grazing lands, youth required to collect and carry firewood for
their families. Such people are often the ones who abide or break the
rules-in-use relating to the natural resource, and yet may not be involved
in participatory decision-making. How far the effective exercise of agency
implies command over ones own labour, and how far it can be exercised
by commanding the labour of others, is a moot point.
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Understanding Agency in Collective Action

Access to natural resources is also enacted through gendered bodies.
Taboos around menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth may restrict
access to natural resources (particularly to water points), collective
ceremonies and public appearances (Upperman, 2000). Additionally,
gendered ideas about strength and physical ability, linked to divisions of
labour and livelihood priorities, shape access and participation (Jackson,
1998, 2000). For example, in Zimbabwe, men rarely headload water but
generally deploy some means of transport (a wheelbarrow, cart, donkey
or bicycle) while women and girl children carry heavy loads in buckets
on their heads. Different physical norms of accessing the resource
entwined with gendered livelihood priorities shape preferences for using
particular waterpoints; men may be more willing to travel further to
waterpoints with plentiful supply (as they could take more water at one
time); women might weigh up the benefits of closeness with the
constraints of queuing and the quality of waterdefinitions often also
related to the amount of work implied (hard water makes washing
clothes more laborious).
We have seen above Dikito-Wachtmeisters analysis of the ways in
which women deployed physical expressions of respect and humility of
public meetings, and how gendered forms of articulation take different
physical forms. Dikito-Wachtmeister goes on to speculate about the impact
of body size on the effective exercise of agency in participatory decisionmaking. She notes the concept of a big man or big woman used
locally as not only denoting body size but wealth and prestige, and
speculates that large body size may generally bestow authoritative
resources in public decision-making contexts in Zimbabwe.

Emotionality: unconscious motivations of intended actions

Social theorists recognize the importance of unconscious motivations of
conscious actions, the unconscious self-disciplining of agents and their
internalization of hegemonic norms. They suggest that not all individual
acts are the results of conscious strategy, but of habit, routine and the
workings of the unconscious mind (Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984).
While Giddens tends towards an emphasis on the nature of agency as
reflexive action, he nonetheless conceives three types of consciousness;
the discursive (those actions and beliefs that agents are able to bring into
discursive scrutiny), the practical (the taken-for-granted everyday practices that are so part of habit routine and precedent that they are rarely
subjected to scrutiny) and the unconscious. Henriques et al. (1984) argue
for the important insights that psycoanalysis can offer for understanding
individual action, offering the concepts of irrational thought and the
unconscious, the complex intertwining of cognition and action and the
influence of the agents history and experience on present behaviour. In
thinking about participation in natural resource management, there has
been an over-emphasis on reflexive action, on deliberative purposive
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F. Cleaver
strategizing and a relative neglect of the impact of the practical and the
unconscious on peoples agency.
Both conscious and unconscious emotions are critical in shaping
peoples sense of self-efficacy and their social relationships (Myers, 1996),
and therefore the extent to which they publicly engage and assert their
rights. Both Kabeer and Agrawal emphasize that, for potential courses of
action to become real, they must be both materially possible and be
conceived by the agent to be within the bounds of possibility. Imagined
autonomy is therefore an important factor in peoples conceptualization
of their own agency. Campbell and Jovchelovitch (2000), writing of the
social psychology of health, link the individuals perception of self-efficacy
to their placement in wider networks of social support and macro-social
factors shaping perceived self-efficacy such as ethnicity, class and gender.
This layered analysis of the psychology of individuals in communities is a
useful antidote to the methodological individualism of bounded rationality approaches.
Mumby and Putnam (1992), writing of models of behaviour in
organizations, further critique bounded rationality assumptions about
individual motivations and preferences through a productive dialogue with
alternative assumptions about bounded emotionality (although they
reject the supposed dichotomy between rationality and emotionality).
They characterize bounded rationality as informed by intentional, reasoned
and goal-directed models of human action, bounded by the limitations of
context and the ability to attain and process information. Institutionally, this
model translates into the need for role-based hierarchies and rules,
boundaries, the divorcing of physical labour and emotions from decisionmaking. By contrast (although carefully not counter-posed as an alternative)
they suggest a model of bounded emotionality based on the recognition of
inter-relatedness, tolerance of ambiguity, community and relational feelings
and embodied self-identities. Some of the desire for relatedness and the
physicality of agency is well represented in the discursive justification of a
young (cattle-less) man in Zimbabwe for volunteering to become a
community grazing policeman. This young man did not directly benefit
from the rotational grazing of cattle, did not own or control land and was
not old enough or wealthy enough to ordinarily command respect. He said:
To be a successful policeman you must catch offenders because then
people will say that is a good policeman and then they will confide in you
and bring problems to you. I am very strict about devoting time to policing,
even in the rainy season when there is plenty to do in the fields, because that
is the only way to be a good policeman.

Conclusion
This paper has raised, and inevitably left unanswered, a number of
questions about agency. Conceptually it leaves unresolved the question of
where the boundaries of agency lie; are all actions constitutive of agency,
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Understanding Agency in Collective Action

whether conscious or unconscious, strategic or habitual? In thinking about
the implications for the collective management of natural resources, and
the prospects for participatory governance, further questions and
dilemmas arise. We need to think further about how far participatory
development initiatives require people to exercise agency within the
existing rules of the game, within the parameters of the programme or
project on offer, the priorities of the implementing agency. Additionally, if
we are concerned with securing more equitable development for millions,
an emphasis on the diverse possibilities of individuals exercising agency is
not enough. Equity concerns and the scale of development goals require
us to recognize the importance of structure in patterning inequality and in
shaping the probable impacts on interventions. If we are interested in how
institutions that shape access to rights and resources work, and how
effective and equitable their outcomes are, we need better understandings
of why and how individuals act, and the balance between empowerment
and constraint in such actions. Critically, we need to expand our gaze
beyond visible public forums of decision-making to the places where
agency is exercised through practice. In particular, we need analyses that
illuminate various aspects of agency in decision-making, with a rigorous
and differentiated scrutiny of the effects of such decision-making on
different actors. Indeed, it seems to me that without a focus on the effects
of exercising agency for differently placed people in relation to others, a
focus on agency-as-decision-making is ultimately sterile.

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