agency
Effective ability to pursue valued ends, define needs or act; include autonomy and usable opportunities.
Research edition · Recorded claims, context and disagreements · About the collection ↗
THE EVENT TAXONOMY
People, needs and agency
Who defines the problem, can use the service, and has the power to respond?
representation
Whose perspectives enter deliberation or design; include missing or limited worker voice.
Where the boundary lies
Attendance or consultation does not establish a vote, veto or binding authority.
See an example →local knowledge
Contextual, professional or lived knowledge used to define problems or judge systems.
Where the boundary lies
Generic expertise without local or affected-person relevance is capacity only.
See an example →unequal harms
Costs or exposure differentiated across people, especially marginalised groups.
Where the boundary lies
Generic unreliability without differentiated effects is reliability.
See an example →livelihoods
Material means of living and dependence on particular work or activities.
social norms
Household, community and organisational expectations or social relationships shaping access, behaviour and participation.
Where the boundary lies
Do not reduce social relationships to individual skill or device ownership.
See an example →intersectionality
Explicit attention to interacting dimensions of disadvantage or power, including feminist and Afrofeminist approaches.
Where the boundary lies
A generic reference to women or a single demographic split alone does not establish intersectional analysis.
See an example →What the comparisons suggest.
Device ownership and expressed interest are incomplete measures of effective access.
Charging, installation costs, household relations, usable language and trusted intermediaries determine whether a service reaches people. Starting with current users can hide exclusion.
Follow the evidence →Representation becomes power only when it affects decisions or creates a credible route to challenge them.
A seat, a consultation or technical expertise may coexist with exclusion from binding decisions. Analyse authority and the costs of participation.
Follow the evidence →Credible judgement requires methods and context appropriate to the question, with failure and missing voices visible.
The corpus contains studies, practitioner accounts, demonstrations, proposals and questions. These establish different things. Local knowledge and negative cases can reveal what a generic measure misses.
Follow the evidence →Watch and question.
All passages in this theme →
1:47Match the evidence to the question
Why trials, qualitative knowledge and institutional analysis answer different questions.
Likely speaker
2:23Interest is not the same as access
The adoption gap starts before installation: devices, data cost and household control.
Likely speaker
2:52A seat at the table is not a veto
A study distinguishes representation, votes and the power to stop a decision.
Likely speaker
Elizabeth A. BennettEndowed Professor; Strategic Advisor · UN Forum on Sustainability Standards (advisory role)LinkedIn ↗
1:54What should scarce minerals be used for?
The transition debate must also consider demand, sufficiency and rights holders.
Likely speaker
Blanca Racionero GómezSenior Researcher, Just Transition and Natural Resources · Business & Human Rights Resource CentreLinkedIn ↗
3:33Possible alternatives, unequal ability to build them
Local-model optimism meets a challenge about resources and bargaining power.
Likely speaker
Bhaskar ChakravortiDean of Global Business; Chair, Digital Planet · The Fletcher School, Tufts UniversityLinkedIn ↗
1:14A risk model still needs human judgement
Methods, assumptions, purpose and escalation remain decisions people must own.
Likely speaker
Themes can overlap. Counts describe this collection; they do not measure importance, agreement or prevalence outside the event.