Un-layering Agency: Foregrounding Invisible Structures to Reimagine Policy for Transformative Change

This paper, based on a study of 206 women sanitation workers across the cities of Jhansi, Ajmer and Muzaffarpur un-layers the concept of ‘agency’ in social development and economic growth. It builds on the lived experiences of these women through a phenomenological lens and problematizes the mainstream definition of agency by World Bank and similar versions in the development sector. Through the experience sets and subject positionality of these women, the blanketed presumption of economic growth and liberalisation enabling agentic and inclusive development is challenged. It does so by looking into a) external constraints (education, nature of employment and awareness of policies and programs) and b) internal constraints (adaptive loyalty, mental/emotional occupational health) that influence the agency of the women on a daily basis. It highlights how the essentialisation of agency in the context of policies, schemes and developmental interventions such as SBM can be more detrimental than ameliorative for marginalised communities by normalising caste based vocation and submerging voices of resistance. The paper argues that for policies to have transformative capacity, it must look into multiple structures underlining agency which do not necessarily contribute to development but certainly limit it.