6 Expanding Agency

Conceptual, Explanatory, and Normative

Implications
christine m. koggel

Introduction
David Crocker opens Ethics of Global Development by telling us that
his aim “is to move development ethics and the capability approach
forward by working out and defending an agency-focused version of
capability ethics” (2008, 1, his emphasis). He also tells us that “his
agency-oriented perspective is an effort to build on, make explicit, and
strengthen Sen’s recent turn to the ideals of public discussion and
democratic participation as integral to freedom-enhancing develop-
ment” (2). Crocker then provides a brief description of Sen’s account
of agency as “a normative ideal that affirms the importance of the
individual and group freedom to deliberate, be architects of their own
lives, and act to make a difference in the world” (19). Finally, Crocker
links this ideal of agency to empowerment, which addresses “those
conditions and processes that enable individuals and groups to
strengthen and exercise their agency” (19). I will begin where
Crocker begins: with the capabilities approach and Sen’s agency-
oriented perspective. As with Crocker and Sen, I am interested in
exploring agency and the role that public discussion plays in accounts
of agency. Before turning to Crocker’s expansion of Sen on agency and
the role of public discussion, however, I will set the stage by evaluating
Sen’s version of the capabilities approach and his account of women’s
agency and what can enhance it (1999, chapter 8).
In this chapter, I argue that what Sen and others in the liberal
tradition take as important for removing inequalities for women and
for enhancing their agency falls short of addressing the following: (1)
possibilities for enhancing women’s agency cannot be fully realized
in and through a justice approach or standard market-oriented poli-
cies for removing gender inequalities; (2) entrenched gender norms

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shape roles and practices that can impede participation in economic,

social, and political institutions even when these institutions are
designed to allow equal participation in the shaping of public policy;
and (3) explicit attention to the full effect of gender norms
entrenched in networks of relationships at familial, institutional,
national, and global levels can challenge and expand our understand-
ing of agency itself as integrally connected with enhancing the agency
of others. My main argument is that although theorists are aware of
the detrimental influences of gender norms on women’s agency, how
this plays out in development theory and the policies endorsed in
a global context reflects assumptions about who agents are and what
agency involves.
To carry out the argument in this chapter, I explore the first short-
coming listed above by discussing the objection that Sen’s focus on
individual freedoms to the exclusion of social values such as care
assumes a particular sort of rational and market-maximizing agent.
This objection, however, does not go far enough in challenging
assumptions about agents, what they value, or their ability to be full
participants in public discussion and the shaping of policy. This leads to
a discussion of point (2) above, for which I turn to Crocker’s account of
deliberative participation. I argue that Crocker takes us partway in
addressing issues of unequal participation, but he does not go far
enough in uncovering gender norms that shape agency in ways that
determine who is heard in public discussion and what is valued in
people’s lives.
I then turn to Nancy Fraser, who exposes the two models of agents
and agency on offer in the liberal tradition, both of which assume the
male as norm. Uncovering the norms that are in place shows why they
are hard to dislodge and result in limited options for addressing gender
inequalities. However, while Fraser endorses a third model, that of the
“Universal Caregiver,” her account also falls short in assuming a norm
that fits the lives of women in the North American context. To develop
this critique of Fraser and to begin to unpack point (3) above, I examine
Alison Weir’s model of the “Universal Global Caregiver” because it
draws attention to the exploitation and marginalization of caregivers in
a global context in which rich countries depend on poor countries to
have caregiving needs met. What emerges is the need to pay attention to
the full and thoroughgoing relationality of agents and agency in
a global context.

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Developing a richer and fuller relational account of agents and

agency lays bare what is at stake in the liberal account of individual
agents as needing to be free to deliberate, make choices, and plan a life
they have reason to value. I borrow from Sarah Clark Miller’s account
of agency as including and needing emotional, relational, and rational
capacities to point to what agency is or should be for all human beings.
A thoroughgoing relational account of agents interacting with and
responding to others by making use of agential skills of relationality,
emotionality, and rationality can best explain the importance of our
obligations for meeting the needs of others. This account of agential
skills can also reveal how agency for self and others is enhanced in and
through networks of relationships at all levels of the personal, local,
national, and global.
This chapter, then, explores answers to several sorts of questions
about those whose lives and experiences tend to be most visible and
valued in the mainstream literature on agency. How do entrenched
gender norms that exist in relationships at all levels from the personal
to the global shape debates on structures and policies and one’s ability
to challenge or change these? Is the very account of agency adopted by
Sen and those who follow him itself fraught with assumptions about
what it means to live a life one has reason to value? What might
attending to these norms and the lives and choices shaped by them
tell us about agency and about the role of public discussion?

The Capabilities Approach and Agency

In general terms “capability ethics,” as Crocker calls it, focuses on what
people are able to be and to do. Sen’s version of the capabilities
approach on which Crocker builds provides a powerful challenge to
dominant views of development and theories of justice. The gist of
Sen’s critique of mainstream theories of justice, such as those advanced
by utilitarians, libertarians, and Rawlsians, is that they fail to capture
the diversity of human beings and the heterogeneity of contexts and
conditions needed for an account of what justice demands:
“The respective roles of personal heterogeneities, environmental diver-
sities, variations in social climate, differences in relational perspectives
and distributions within the family have to receive the serious attention
they deserve for the making of public policy” (1999, 109). For Sen,
facts of diversity mean that no simple descriptions of agents and no

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definitive list of measures that can enhance agency can be had. Context
and conditions matter to the description and analysis. Sen provides
examples of
capabilities like being able to avoid such deprivations as starvation, under-
nourishment, escapable morbidity and premature mortality, as well as the
freedoms that are associated with being literate and numerate, enjoying
political participation and uncensored speech and so on. In this constitutive
perspective, development involves expansion of these and other basic free-
doms. Development, in this view, is the process of expanding human free-
doms, and the assessment of development has to be informed by this
consideration. (36)

Sen’s account, thus, allows an examination into whether individuals in

specific contexts and under certain conditions have the freedom to
function in ways that matter to themselves (their subjective assessment
of what matters to them) and to their well-being (an objective account
of capabilities that allow one to live well). Sen’s account is, therefore,
important for providing a context-sensitive approach that makes the
interconnectedness of kinds of unfreedoms clear and convincing.
For Sen, development as freedom gives a central role to agency;
individuals ought to be able to act for themselves and control the course
of their own life. As against previous accounts of development, Sen
argues that people “need not be seen primarily as passive recipients of
the benefits of cunning development programs” and that they should be
treated as agents who “can effectively shape their own destiny and help
each other” (11). Two aspects of freedom are also relevant to an
account of agency. Enhancing agency can mean removing barriers
and thus opening up a broader range of options from which people
can choose. What one chooses is then up to the person’s subjective
assessment of what matters to them. This aspect of agency is captured
by the notion of agency freedom. However, agency is also about being
able to make one’s life better – by accessing and making use of primary
goods such as health care, education, and work; using the abilities one
has to make substantive use of opportunities; and being free to parti-
cipate in, deliberate about, and have a say in the shaping of economic,
social, and political institutions. This aspect of agency is captured by
the notion of well-being freedom. With respect to the second aspect,
removing unfreedoms such as premature mortality, undernourishment,
and ill-health as well as lack of access to education, work, and political

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participation can, then, expand an individual’s capacity to pursue goals

and objectives he or she values and has “reason to value” (56, 63).
What one values is both differentiated from and connected with what
one has “reason to value.” For Sen, the subjective elements of agency
freedom are integrally connected with the objective elements of well-
being freedom.
In Sen’s view, judgments about what is of value and about what
policies will remove unfreedoms and enhance agency should be made in
and through democratic processes that emphasize the importance of
the exercise of public reasoning; that focus on implementing policies
applicable to specific contexts and conditions; and that can provide
justifications for why some processes or policies are better than others
for addressing injustices or for achieving better or more justice in
specific contexts. Sen frequently turns to examples to capture the com-
plexity of his account. He tells us that African Americans have higher
incomes than people in other parts of the world, but “an absolutely
lower chance of reaching mature ages than do people of many third
world societies” (6). Sen’s point is that deprivations can come about
even when one has income to meet basic needs and when legal and
formal barriers to voting and participation are removed.
The disenfranchisement and alienation of African Americans from
democratic processes of voting and participating in debates as well as
their overrepresentation in prison populations and the ranks of the
poor distort and have deleterious effects on policies for removing
these injustices.
As mentioned earlier, Sen emphasizes the importance of public dis-
cussion and deliberation to the making of public policy (2009, 392).
The discussion of African Americans alerts us to the fact that Sen is
aware of the ways in which some people are barred from entering
public discussion or having an influence on public policy. These con-
stitute injustices that emerge from racism in the USA. Direct attention,
then, needs to be paid to background conditions of oppression that
determine who gets to engage in the public discussion that then shapes
public policy. Yet, I will argue that Sen’s failure to fully account for the
detrimental effects of oppressive norms is reflected in the agency-
enhancing policies that he ends up endorsing. These policies already
reveal norms that escape the scrutiny and challenge required for the
kind of public discussion that can lead to real change. We need to
attend to broader framework issues that reflect and manifest social

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and political structures and conditions of oppression. Once the pieces

of my argument are in place, I will circle back to the example of African
Americans and have much more to say about agency and the role of
public discussion than is possible on Sen’s account or in standard
liberal theory more generally. But, before I get there, I need to discuss
Sen’s account of women’s agency.

Sen on Women’s Inequalities and Policies for Enhancing

Women’s Agency
Sen is rightly credited for paying attention to women’s agency: “[t]he
extensive reach of women’s agency is one of the more neglected areas
of development studies, and most urgently in need of correction.
Nothing, arguably, is as important today in the political economy
of development as an adequate recognition of political, economic
and social participation and leadership of women. This is indeed
a crucial aspect of ‘development as freedom’” (1999, 109). For Sen,
women’s agency can be effectively enhanced when their lack of free-
dom in specific areas such as access to health care, education, eco-
nomic and work opportunities, and political participation is
removed. When women’s agency is expanded in these ways,
women are better able to live lives they have “reason to value”
(56, 63).
Let me clarify that it is not that Sen fails to recognize that
entrenched gender norms act as barriers to women being able to
exercise agency and well-being freedoms. Rather, it is that Sen
assumes and attends to freedoms valued by a particular kind of
person, one who works outside the home and has influence in
economic, social, and political spheres. The thrust of this criticism
can be captured by returning to an item on Sen’s list of diversities
and heterogeneities quoted earlier; that of unequal “distributions
within the family” that affect what women can be and do. It is
certainly true that inequalities in the family hinder possibilities for
enhancing women’s agency and well-being freedoms. However, on
my critique, diminishing the impact of these entrenched gender
norms through the removal of the kinds of unfreedoms that Sen
identifies will not be enough. When it comes to promoting women’s
agency and well-being freedoms, Sen turns to the usual set of liberal
strategies and policies:

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empirical work in recent years has brought out very clearly how the relative
respect and regard for women’s well-being is strongly influenced by such
variables as women’s ability to earn an independent income, to find employ-
ment outside the home, to have ownership rights and to have literacy and be
educated participants in decisions within and outside the family. Indeed, even
the survival disadvantage of women compared with men in developing
countries seems to go down sharply – and may even get eliminated – as
progress is made in these agency aspects. (191)

Elsewhere I have argued that by explicitly promoting freedoms such

as being educated, being able to work outside the home, owning
property, and having access to health care, Sen at least implies that
women’s agency is best expanded when they reject the work and values
associated with caring for others (Koggel 2003, 2009). One observa-
tion would have us say that Sen is certainly right to suggest that when
women refuse to limit themselves to care work, they expand their
agency and well-being freedoms. Another observation would have us
say that he is right to suggest that the best strategy is for women to insist
that they have the full range of options (agency freedom) open to them
and that they avail themselves of these options to improve their lives
(well-being freedom). However, both observations mean that Sen
leaves an unexamined assumption in place: the home is mainly
a domain of unfreedoms for women. Under these conditions of unfree-
doms (that certainly persist for many women around the world), it is
not perceived as “rational” for women to “choose” to limit their
agency and well-being freedoms by having their life plans and goals
wrapped up in caring for others.
To be clear about the argument I am advancing, I am not claiming
that these policies do not enhance women’s agency and well-being
freedoms. Removing unfreedoms in areas such as work opportunities
and political participation can enhance women’s agency. My questions
are about what gets assumed and what gets left out when these sorts of
policies are endorsed. To show this, I argue, we need to engage in
a closer examination of the role of gender norms in the shaping and
reshaping of women’s lives and their possibilities for agency.
Background conditions of oppression and entrenched gender norms
shape perceptions of what women can do and be in ways that are hard
to recognize let alone dislodge. It will take more than endorsing the
importance of the “political, economic, and social participation and
leadership” of women. Care, whether of children, the elderly, or the

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disabled, tends to be what women do but it is devalued in political,

economic, and social spheres. In other words, Sen’s account falls short
of being able to capture the full scope of conceptual, explanatory, and
normative implications for agency as displayed in values and activities
assumed in and relegated to the private sphere. Women’s lives continue
to be subject to gender norms that affect their ability to enhance their
agency and well-being freedoms as well as their ability to enhance the
agency and well-being freedoms of others.
The underlying issue is Sen’s problematic focus on individuals and on
the goal of enhancing their agency so that they can live lives they value
or have reason to value: “individual agency is, ultimately, central to
addressing these deprivations” (1999, xi). Unsurprisingly, Sen’s indi-
viduals tend to be people who are rational choosers, eager participants
in market structures, and central actors in public and political spheres.
Many women throughout the world, who take on the responsibilities
of or are assumed to be responsible for meeting the needs of others,
tend not to be eager participants in market structures or political
actors. Yet, on Sen’s account, this kind of nonpolitical or nonmarket
person is merely encouraged to engage in public discussions that shape
public policy: “there is a real need – for social justice – for people to be
able to take part in these social decisions, if they so choose” (242).
Nevertheless, members of oppressed groups tend to be subject to norms
that stereotype who they are and what they can be and do. This makes
it difficult for them to engage in public discussion that can lead to
devising policies that speak to who they are and what they do that is
of value to themselves and to families and communities.
I already mentioned that Sen cannot be faulted for failing to recog-
nize the role of gender norms in shaping women’s inequalities and
limiting their agency. My argument against Sen is two-pronged: (1)
the strategies and policies that he ends up endorsing make large parts of
women’s lives invisible or unimportant in what counts and is valued in
social, economic, and political participation; and (2) making the invi-
sible visible not only challenges standard liberal policies that tend to get
endorsed by capability theorists and justice theory more generally, but
allows us to sketch an enriched account of agents themselves. Before
I turn to unpacking these criticisms of Sen, and of liberal theory more
generally, it will be useful to repeat that mainstream liberal theorists
recognize the impact of gender norms at the same time as they advocate
particular sorts of agency-enhancing measures that assume the male

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norm of the economic, political, and social actor. In other words, the
default is to endorse liberal strategies of greater access to jobs, educa-
tion, and representation in political structures as ways to increase
women’s agency and well-being. Exploring these accounts of women’s
agency will allow me to highlight what goes wrong with conceptions of
agency and policies for enhancing agency when oppressive social
norms limit or thwart possibilities for participating in public discussion
that can challenge or change those norms.

Crocker on Expanding Agency through Deliberation

and Participation
Capability ethics is clear that agency freedom (the negative freedom to
do what one chooses without barriers or interference from others)
should be viewed as integrally connected with well-being freedom
(the positive freedom to avoid deprivations and develop capabilities
one has and has reason to value). In Ethics of Global Development,
Crocker defends Sen on issues of underspecifying freedoms and refus-
ing to prioritize kinds of freedoms because, like Sen, he wants to leave
room for interpretation, decision-making, and policy implementation
in specific contexts – in other words, to leave room for people to
exercise their political agency. For Sen, political agency, as exemplified
by participation in public discussion and debate, is crucial to the mak-
ing of public policy (2009, 392). These are aspects of Sen to which
Crocker is drawn in using Sen to frame and develop his own account of
deliberative democracy and participation.
Crocker recognizes the role that deliberation can play in settling
disagreements and shaping public policy, but he also recognizes that
some people can be excluded or marginalized in these processes
designed to formulate policy through the deliberation of participants.
It can be said, then, that Crocker is more detailed and specific than is
Sen on the issue of people being “able to take part in these social
decisions, if they so choose” (Sen 1999, 242). This is why Crocker
sets out to delineate principles that are meant to regulate and enable
deliberative participation. These principles are: reciprocity (“each
member can make proposals and offer justification in terms others
can understand and could accept”); publicity (“each member be free
to engage [directly or by representation] in the deliberative process,
that the process be transparent to all . . . and that each know that to

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which she is agreeing or disagreeing”); and accountability (“each group

member is accountable to all [and not to himself or herself alone] in the
sense of giving acceptable reasons to the others”) (2008, 312–313).
Crocker also argues, in the end, that the effectiveness of these principles
for addressing existing inequalities or for including those who are
marginalized require background conditions of equal political liberty,
equality before the law, economic justice, and procedural fairness
(317–318). In other words, as I have argued elsewhere (Koggel
2015), Crocker can be said to privilege constitutional guarantees of
particular kinds of freedoms. These elements that structure deliberative
participation may put Crocker in the uneasy position of being closer to
Nussbaum than to Sen on the issue of underspecification that he
endorses in Sen. Yet, Crocker is explicit in his turn to Sen and against
Nussbaum on the issue of having a list (2008, 19). Crocker also reports
that in his earlier work he merely noted that Nussbaum “lacked Sen’s
notion of agency” and that he now understands agency as necessary to
an account of “citizen participation and democratic decision-making”
(19). Ethics of Global Development is, therefore, Crocker’s reflections
on the evolution of Sen’s notion of agency and his own attempt to give
substance to the connection between economic, social, and political
agency and the deliberative participation that can shape public policy.
That said, I still want to ask whether Crocker is closer to Nussbaum
than Sen in his overspecification of conditions or foundations for
deliberative participation. Is the kind of deliberation Crocker endorses
possible in nonliberal societies or between nonliberal and liberal socie-
ties? In other words, the conditions that can enable deliberative parti-
cipation and enhance political agency are those that Rawls defends as
the institutional framework that structures liberal democracies. Sen
also defends democratic freedoms when he delineates the intrinsic,
instrumental, and constructive roles that democracy can play, all of
which rest on something like the enabling conditions Crocker defends
(Sen 1999, chapter 6). Yet, these do not play a foundational role for Sen
whose context-sensitive account leaves the deliberation to those in
particular societies who need to make policies that are effective for
their societies. These are large foundational issues that deserve treat-
ment in a separate paper. My concern in this chapter is with whether
Crocker’s explicit attention to formulating principles and conditions to
address inequalities that result in marginalization and exclusion in
deliberative participation can succeed in giving voice to the agents

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I have identified as either invisible or excluded from exercising political

agency. I will show in the section that follows that attending to the
liberal assumptions about economic, social, and political actors and
institutions is no accident or a mere tangent. These assumptions under-
gird each of the accounts by Sen, Nussbaum, and Crocker. They are
assumptions that are difficult to identify and dislodge – even by those
theorists critical of the “independent and rational market actor” so
central to mainstream theories of justice and to development theory
and policy.

Exposing the Rational and Individualist Agent and Expanding

an Account of Agency
In a much-misunderstood paper published in the special issue on Sen in
Feminist Economics, Des Gasper and Irene van Staveren side with
Nussbaum against Sen on the issue of what they take to be Sen’s
problematic turn to the language of freedom. They challenge Sen’s
use of freedom as the overarching value to the exclusion of specifying
other important values. They argue that Sen’s account “implicitly
idealizes Man as independent, already autonomous, rather than
a social being, someone socialized into the norms and values of
a community, cared for by parents, and having personal bonds as
well as rights and duties towards society” (Gasper and van Staveren
2003, 140, their emphasis). Their critique may seem to offer little more
than the standard one against many liberal theorists: Sen falls into the
trap of having the individualist, autonomous, and independent self as
a stand-in for all human beings. Gasper and van Staveren insist that
care be specified as a unique and important social value and set of
activities that cannot be subsumed under freedom. In other words, they
charge Sen with taking his main actor to be the sort of individual whose
identity and life plans are not shaped by the values and practices of
caring and meeting the needs of others. Individuals are not only or
mainly “choosers who reason” about their own lives (149). For them,
Sen’s account of freedom and agency is not helpful for thinking about
care as a value in and of itself, for understanding the content of care as
a value distinct from freedom, or for promoting care as a value that
defies being subsumed under freedom.
Gasper and van Staveren’s point is not that freedom can’t be made to
cover or explain values and practices associated with care, but that how

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freedom can do this and at the same time capture the range and
diversity of agents needs to be specified, articulated, and defended.
Otherwise, assumptions will be made about how agents are best able
to enhance agency and well-being freedoms; that is, assumptions will
be made that they can best do this through venues that enhance “poli-
tical, economic and social participation and leadership.” However, if
this participation already embeds gender norms about caregiving and
about who cares, it will not result in the sort of public discussion that
can challenge the detrimental influence of these norms or change poli-
cies for enhancing women’s agency. Their critique is important, but
I want to argue that Gasper and van Staveren do not go far enough
either in challenging Sen or raising questions about Nussbaum’s project
of using a list of capabilities (one that includes social values of care) to
generate a theory of justice. While Nussbaum’s account may be better
able to incorporate the importance of care in women’s lives, it is still
from the perspective of expanding an individual woman’s set of options
so she can choose to take up caring for others as the kind of life she has
reason to value. Moreover, the person who cares for others can choose
this freely when the standard set of options of being able to work
outside the home, have access to education and political participation,
and so on are available and then rejected by her. In other words, the
most that Nussbaum’s theory of justice can do is to make it easier for
women to choose to care for others – against a background that keeps
oppressive gender norms in place.
Of course, feminists who want to acknowledge the importance of
care in many women’s lives and to their identities and yet do not want
to limit an account of women’s agency to merely embracing these
values, identities, and practices to the exclusion of the self face
a difficult task. Perhaps the problem of over- or undervalorizing care
can be best handled if we focus on how gender norms are shaped in and
through relationships of power – in various domains and at a variety of
levels. Entrenched gender norms prescribe who should take responsi-
bility for meeting the needs of others. Care roles and practices are
necessary for the survival and the thriving of children, families, and
communities, but they usually impede political, social, or economic
participation. Thus, both the standard moves of either questioning or
finding value in gender norms tend to keep institutional structures of
what counts as contributing to economic, social, or political spheres in
place. This makes it difficult to understand how these institutional

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structures often work to diminish women’s agency (in both senses of

agency freedom and well-being freedom) and their ability to enhance
the agency and well-being freedoms of others.
Sen broadens the informational base for assessing inequalities and
thereby captures the many, varied, and interconnected features of
agents and possibilities for enhancing agency. However, his account
does not capture how particular sorts of agents have lives shaped by
norms and institutional structures that often leave them powerless to
remove, challenge, or change them. These agents may have all the
enabling conditions that Crocker defends – equal political liberty,
equality before the law, economic justice, and procedural fairness –
yet they may be marginalized or silenced when it comes to the effective
realization of the principles of reciprocity, publicity, and accountabil-
ity. To understand how caring for others tends to limit one’s agency
means understanding how assumptions about the value and practices
of care shape institutions, structures, and world views so that they are
taken for granted and perceived as not needing to be challenged or
changed. These assumptions reach to the very notion of who an agent is
understood to be and what decisions and choices an agent makes or
should make.
There is another point to be made about Sen’s account that is not
properly addressed in the Gasper and van Staveren critique. Sen does
not ignore the importance of social relations and values to agents:
“Expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value not only
makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be
fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions and interacting
with – and influencing – the world in which we live” (1999, 14–15).
We may say, instead, that Sen assumes that lives that are very social in
the sense that they are integrally connected with promoting the agency
and well-being of others do not fit the norm of lives “we have reason to
value.” Such an agent might be perceived as “influencing the world in
which we live,” but such an agent may be limiting, or at least be
perceived as limiting, rather than exercising their “own volitions.”
Sen may be best understood, then, as recognizing that care as it is
currently perceived and practiced (devalued) creates gender inequalities
in homes and families, restricts opportunities, and limits women’s
economic, social, and political freedoms. The point that needs to be
made, however, is that he says little to address or change the institu-
tions and structures that assume and embed norms that devalue caring

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practices – for various women in multiple ways in different contexts.

These are norms that tend to make it incoherent to say that caring for
others can be integral to enhancing agency and well-being freedoms for
oneself or others. Moreover, possibilities for engaging in public discus-
sions about the effect of these norms on people’s lives are not likely to
be present or be able to influence the debate that leads to public policies
that challenge and change these.
To sum up thus far, we seem to be trapped in a conceptual frame-
work that assumes and keeps in place the norm of the economic, social,
and political actor as independent and best viewed as needing to
identify and pursue their rational plan of life. This means that public
discussion and participation will not be about the very structures that
frame who gets to live a life “one” has reason to value. While Crocker
escapes some of this critique by zeroing in on principles and enabling
conditions for effective deliberative participation, his account still falls
prey to these conditions not being accessible or effective for challenging
gender norms that shape assumptions about who gets to engage as
political actors and who can shape public policy. In the end, then, none
of the accounts we have examined thus far, whether by Sen, Crocker, or
Gasper and van Staveren and their defense of Nussbaum, succeeds in
moving us out of the liberal framework that assumes and embeds
norms about what individuals tend to or should pursue as lives they
have reason to value. Because this critique questions the very frame-
works themselves and how they structure the debates, it will be useful
to examine the frameworks more closely.

Models of Agents and Agency in Liberal Theory

Nancy Fraser’s discussion of the two models of agents and policies that
dominate liberal theory is useful for illuminating how both fail to
address or remove unfreedoms emerging from structures and institu-
tions that embed gender norms. “The Universal Breadwinner Model”
aims to foster gender equality by promoting women’s employment and
supporting employment-enabling services such as day care.
The assumption is that everyone should work for wages and that
women’s agency is enhanced when their freedom to work outside the
home is the same as men’s. I have shown how these assumptions are
evident in and emerge from Sen’s account. “The Caregiver Parity
Model” aims to foster gender equality by supporting informal care

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work through state provision of caregiver allowances. With this model

the goal is not to make women’s lives the same as men’s but to “make
their difference costless” by elevating informal domestic and reproduc-
tive labour “to parity with formal paid labour” (Fraser 1997, 55). This
could be said to be the model that Gasper and van Staveren defend in
their critique of Sen. And it seems to fit with Nussbaum acknowledging
the importance of care by making it possible for women to choose this
kind of life by making “their difference costless.”
Fraser argues that both models are supported by liberals and many
feminists, but that neither succeeds in uncovering or questioning the
implicit “male as norm” and neither “asks men to change” (60).
The failure to challenge assumptions embedded in current practices
and policies means that women’s activities and life patterns are not
fully recognized or respected. Fraser rejects both models and pro-
poses a third, that of “The Universal Caregiver”: “a third possibility
is to induce men to become more like women are now, namely,
people who do primary carework” (60, her emphasis). Quoting the
Swedish Ministry of Labor, Fraser finds support for the vision behind
this model: “‘To make it possible for both men and women to
combine parenthood and gainful employment, a new view of the
male role and a radical change in the organization of working life
are required’” (62).
The Universal Caregiver model is meant to reveal and challenge the
entrenchment of gender norms: “the construction of breadwinning and
caregiving as separate roles, coded masculine and feminine respec-
tively, is a principal undergirding [of] the current gender order” (61).
Fraser’s call for deconstructing gender is perhaps a tall order that says
more about the deficiencies in the two models that currently structure
liberal theory and policy than about how to reach this utopian vision of
inducing “men to become more like women are now.” That said,
Fraser’s account is instructive for highlighting the role of gender
norms at the very heart of liberal institutions and structures. Yet, her
account also falls prey to certain assumptions. Alison Weir agrees with
Fraser’s account of the two models that dominate liberal thinking and
she also agrees that both are problematic and deficient. Yet, she argues
that all three models, including Fraser’s Universal Caregiver model,
focus too exclusively on gender norms from the perspective of women
in the USA. In other words, Fraser’s account falls short because it fails
to capture how gender norms operate in a global context in which

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 170 C. M. Koggel

relations of power at all levels of race, class, nation-state, and global

markets shape how gender norms are utilized in particular contexts.
Weir situates care work in a global context and proposes that
a more accurate account of the Universal Caregiver is one that
“takes the perspective of the marginalized poorly-paid careworker”
(2005, 311) as a starting point. For Weir, the perspectives of “immi-
grants and other marginalized workers who work for poverty-level
wages” can help illuminate the exploitation involved in global care
chains that have these women care for other people’s children in
order to care for their own children in their home countries.
Moreover, market structures, capitalism, and globalization not only
shape global care chains but they keep them in place in ways that
allow privileged caregivers in North countries to exploit the racia-
lized, gendered, and class-based aspects of carework. From the per-
spective of the “most marginalized and least empowered” (311),
“care is not simply the underpaid labor they provide for others;
care – for their own children and families – is what they are too
often unable to provide, because the conditions of global capitalism
deny them the right to care for their own children, and the freedom
to live the lives they would choose” (312). Weir’s model of the
“Global Universal Caregiver” departs from Fraser’s account in
arguing that “global care chains can be unlocked only by radical
change: only by a shift in our definition of the person, and the
citizen, from independent worker to interdependent caregiver”
(312). Thus, it will not only be men who need to change by rejecting
the rational, independent, market-maximizing male as the norm for
the social, economic, and political actor. What needs to be chal-
lenged and changed is the global order itself, one that supports
oppression and domination in and through the intersections of
race, gender, ethnicity, and class with respect to care work. While
both the Fraser and Weir projects highlight what is missing or taken
for granted in accounts of agency on offer in the liberal tradition,
Weir’s vision of the Global Universal Caregiver pinpoints features of
interdependencies in a global context that provides a deep running
challenge to the conceptions of agents and agency examined thus far.
The challenge, as Weir notes, pushes in the direction of reconceptua-
lizing the person and the citizen, the agent and agency itself, in terms
of interdependence rather than independence.

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 Expanding Agency 171

Moving Beyond Liberal Theory: Expanding the Concept of

Agency and Challenging Norms
As with Nussbaum, Sen’s account can accommodate the idea that one’s
well-being can be tied up with caring for others and that this can
enhance one’s agency freedom. In other words, these need not be
construed as irrational choices. Moreover, and as noted earlier, Sen
cannot be said to ignore relational evaluations of well-being. Instead,
the point is that in focusing on individuals and the kinds of freedoms
that matter to them, Sen’s account fails to be explicit about how and
why lives and identities wrapped up in caring practices and in respon-
sibilities for meeting the needs of others (for parts of every individual’s
life) often diminish agency and well-being freedoms for those who take
on these responsibilities. Moreover, these caring practices can diminish
an individual’s freedom at the same time as those cared for must rely on
caregivers for enhancing both their agency and well-being freedoms.
These points need to be spelled out because values and practices asso-
ciated with care do not have an easy fit with projects of enhancing one’s
own freedom. Moreover, they tend to be invisible and part of the
assumed background against which theorists fall back on endorsing
standard agency-enhancing solutions of having women work outside
the home and be players in economic and political structures. Their
being invisible and assumed means that possibilities for understanding
the negative aspects of these values and practices or having their
positive aspects reflected in public policy are inhibited by women’s
lack of voice and participation in debates or policies that could result
in real challenge and change to the entrenched gender norms. These
norms sustain the very inequalities that Sen wants to address – women’s
lack of agency and well-being freedoms to work outside the home,
participate in debates, or be engaged in the making of public policy.
These are some of the important insights to take from the Fraser and
Weir projects of uncovering the norms underlying the frameworks at
the heart of liberal theory and global market structures. Yet, I think we
can do more than expose norms underlying models and overarching
frameworks that have been on offer in mainstream liberal theory and
policy.
A promising approach would involve taking a closer look at the
notion of agency assumed by Sen and other liberal theorists so as to
question institutions and structures built on norms that interpret caring

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 172 C. M. Koggel

practices and responsibilities for meeting the needs of others as hin-

drances to agency. In other words, the liberal understanding of agency,
a norm assumed in mainstream moral and political theory, may itself
need to be challenged. This move is made by Sarah Clark Miller when
she departs from standard accounts of agency in terms of a person’s
capacity to use reason to plan and control the course of one’s life.
Miller argues that agency also needs to capture the emotional and
relational features of all agents who cannot but engage with others in
moral decision-making processes that can harm or enhance agency and
well-being freedoms for oneself and others.
As embodied creatures with physical, psychological, and emotional
needs, Miller argues that agency can be compromised and result in
harm to an agent when “people cannot act as agents in their own lives.
Their rational, autonomous, emotional, and relational abilities are
squandered. In short, the presence of unmet fundamental needs can
render humans unable to function in the most basic of ways” (2012,
26). Facts about interdependencies and relationships have implications
for how we actually engage and should engage with others. Miller
differs from the accounts discussed thus far in that she connects her
account of agential capacities to obligations all of us have for meeting
the needs of others. She zeroes in on the significance of agency and the
harm of compromised agency as that which accounts for the signifi-
cance of needs and of moral responsibilities for responding to them.
Agents have needs that are best met in and through interdependent
networks of relationships in which agents make use of relational,
emotional, and rational skills. Moreover, responding in morally appro-
priate ways to another’s needs requires that agents call on these agential
capacities to know how to best enable these very same capacities in
others. In short, Miller’s enriched and expanded account of agency sets
obligations on any and all to respond to the needs of others in ways that
“establish, maintain, or restore human agency” (37) for ourselves and
others.
There are a number of points to make in connection with Miller’s
expanded account of agency. It already moves us well beyond a focus
on agents as rational choosers; it allows an examination of the com-
plexity of lives affected in and through networks of relationships in
a global context; and it ties obligations to an account of needs and of
responsibilities to meet needs so as to maintain, restore, or strengthen
agency. Agency is, thus, the hallmark of one’s ability to care for oneself

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and for others. These are aspects of Miller’s account that point to the
fundamental fact and significance of interdependence.1
The implications for agency are clear: all of us have relational, emo-
tional, and rational capacities that we call on and should develop in
order to be effective agents in our interactions with and obligations to
others. The irony for the liberal theorist focused on the role of reason in
shaping a rational plan of life is that this sort of agent also calls on
emotional and relational capacities in the choices made to abstract
from relationships and suppress emotions in learning to live a life one
has reason to value.
Agency can be harmed or enhanced in and through relationships in
which we find ourselves, are faced with choices, and make decisions
about what to do. A critical analysis of networks within which personal
and public relationships exist can show why developing each of the
capacities in the triad of relationality, emotionality, and rationality is
important at all levels; of individuals, families, communities, nations,
and the global context. Miller is explicit about her project being
focused on moral rather than political obligations and implications.
She begins from “the point of view of individual moral agents making
decisions about how to act and how to live” (138). I would argue that
a thoroughgoing relational account of interdependencies in a global
context makes the delineation of the moral and political and the focus
on the moral hard to maintain. As Weir shows in her defense of the
Global Universal Caregiver, agents reason about their own lives in the
context of networks of relationships and emotional attachments in
what are now complex global chains of interdependencies. Attention
to these global chains not only highlights the intersectionality of race,
gender, ethnicity, class, and so on, it also points to the need for
a sophisticated and complex analysis of gender norms in a global
context.

Conclusion: Tying It All Together

I began the chapter with Crocker: his following Sen on agency and his
continued commitment to developing an account of public discussion
and deliberation as vital to enhancing agency. I want to end by sketch-
ing some of the implications of using an expanded account of agents as
relational, emotional, and rational and nested in a global context of
interdependencies. To summarize what emerged from Sen, his account

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 174 C. M. Koggel

can be said to be multidimensional in its rejection of a too easy distinc-

tion between negative and positive freedoms; in its account of the
interconnectedness and complementarity of agency and well-being
freedoms; in its insistence that context matters to an account of unfree-
doms and to the analysis of policies that will work to remove them; and
in its defense of an inclusive and deliberative understanding of partici-
pation and of public discussion more generally.
I argued that Sen’s account does not capture the full effects of gender
norms assumed and entrenched in broader networks of relationships.
Relationships at all levels of the personal, public, national, and global
determine who engages in what activities and who has the power to
dictate the meaning and value of those activities. Sen assumes rather
than questions liberal understandings of the agent and liberal policies
for what enhances agency. As against Sen, Crocker recognizes that
more than encouragement to participate is needed to have those who
are excluded and marginalized heard in ways that can shape public
policy. Yet, his delineation of principles and conditions for deliberative
participation still places his account in a liberal framework that
assumes certain sorts of economic, social, and political actors and
institutions. This is the actor that also features, in the end, in the
Gasper and van Staveren and Nussbaum critiques of Sen. Devising
strategies for ensuring participation in public discussion is important,
but we need to be cognizant of how participation for some is under-
mined and restricted in ways that make it difficult for them to challenge
let alone reshape public policy that can address the inequalities of the
“most marginalized and least empowered” (Weir 2005, 311).
The path followed in this chapter had me arrive at a critique of liberal
models and overarching frameworks from which emerged
a reconception of the very account of agents and agency at the heart
of the debates about what can enhance agency. The result was a clearer
picture of how gender norms are implicated in accounts of agents and
agency on offer in mainstream theory and policy. Miller’s account of
the rational, emotional, and relational capacities employed and needed
by all agents to fulfill obligations to meet the needs of selves and others
is an account of agency that makes the effects of gender norms on lives
and policies visible. Placing Miller’s account in the broader global
context described by Weir adds additional levels of complexity by
explaining how gender norms are also shaped by race, class, ethnicity,
caste, and so on – and all in a global context in which liberal

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 Expanding Agency 175

frameworks and policies dominate. I will end by sketching ever so

briefly how the shape and direction of my arguments fit together by
returning to a discussion of Sen’s example of the unfreedoms of African
Americans.
As discussed earlier, Sen’s multidimensional account would take the
history and ongoing discrimination of African Americans to be relevant
to the analysis of data that show that African Americans have higher
early mortality rates than many people in so-called developing coun-
tries. Conceiving of agents as having rational, emotional, and relational
capacities can reveal features in addition to those Sen identifies in his
examination of specific kinds of data. African Americans are indeed
overrepresented in the ranks of the poor and in prison populations, but
we also need to note the detrimental effect this has on families, on rates
of single African American mothers living in poverty, on their ability to
care for themselves and families, on ongoing racism that persists in
policing and prison policies that too often remove African Americans
from families and communities, and on high levels of apathy and
alienation from democratic processes. Moreover, possibilities for effec-
tive agency are limited by institutional structures in a network of
relationships that force many African Americans to be in relation
with those who control social welfare programs, administer health-
care plans, determine reproductive and child-care policies, set workfare
rules, deal with domestic or community violence, or decide who has
housing and where. These factors place a heavy emotional burden on
individuals and relationships and they create and perpetuate funda-
mental needs that “render humans unable to function in the most basic
of ways” (Miller 2012, 26). It is important to note that my account
would not accept descriptions of African Americans as mere victims of
racism and oppressive structures. They are agents who use and need to
use relational, emotional, and rational capacities to make decisions
about how to act and how to live in these very contexts that limit
possibilities for effective agency.
Even when relationships at the public level determine how or
whether agential capacities are thwarted rather than respected, agents
can and must act in ways that make it possible for them to maintain,
restore, or strengthen the ability to care for self and others in their
communities. All that they do and need to do restricts their ability to
participate in public discussion that can lead to meaningful change at
the same time as it challenges norms of what it means to be an

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 176 C. M. Koggel

economic, social, and political actor. The account I provide takes the
attention away from the normative implications of considering agents
as planning and enacting a life they have reason to value – on their own
and through standard policies designed to enhance agency and well-
being freedoms. Instead, my account highlights the need to pay atten-
tion to inequalities and barriers to effective agency that emerge from
oppressive norms and institutional structures. These norms and struc-
tures are especially important in understanding the racialized and class-
based nature of gender norms in African-American communities and in
the global context.
We have gone well beyond the theorists examined in this chapter on
issues of how to enhance agency and well-being freedoms.
An expanded notion of agency that incorporates the rational, emo-
tional, and relational capacities of all agents can help identify whose
voices are excluded from the public discussion that can shape and
change public policy. As long as public discussion gives the rational
agent who makes decisions on how to live a life one has reason to value
center stage in economic and political matters, it will be difficult to hear
what those who are “most marginalized and least empowered” in
interdependent global chains of oppression say about their lives.
It will take a lot of work and effort to reach the goal Crocker imagines
in his account of public discussion and deliberative democracy that has
a “vision of the ethically justified ends, means, and responsibilities of
development in a globalized world – a vision not to be uncritically,
mechanically, or slavishly applied but one to be democratically
debated, criticized, adapted, and improved” (2008, 392).

Note
1. There is a vast and growing literature on relational theory from which
Miller draws and develops her account of agency, but also from which
feminists have developed accounts of justice and equality, for example,
that challenge conceptions of these key concepts in traditional liberal
theory (Koggel 2002, 2012). Two recent collections show the range and
reach of this work: Downie and Llewellyn (2012) and Meynell,
Campbell, and Sherwin (2009). The work of Iris Marion Young (2012)
also makes use of relational insights in her account of a social connection
model from which she criticizes liberal conceptions of justice and
responsibility.

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 Expanding Agency 177

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