Agency Scaffolding: From Anthropocentric to Relational Action. A Critical Review

Values are in dialectic co-construction. Values are relational, that is, they emerge when two or more forces engage with one another to bring forth plural realities. Similarly, as an emergent property of the encounter between forces, social agency, or capacity to act, is not an exclusive domain of the human. This review paper is a critical approximation to the Agency Theory (AT) in the social sciences today. (1) We review AT in several scholarly fields to then (2) discuss critical approaches in race and actor-network theory; then, (3) we probe AT in ecological economics with a focus on collective action and (4) propose a relational concept of agency based on this critical review. (5) To illustrate a paradigm shift in social agency—from anthropocentric to relational—we close with a call for “a pedagogy of care and the defense of life” beyond human-only approaches to social agency.