More-than-human agency: from the human economy to ecological livelihoods

What is economic agency and where is it situated? Who or what is the source of dynamism and change in economic relations? Common answers to these questions tend to assume a discrete human subject at the centre of the action, labouring, producing, transacting, and negotiating various forms of care and access. Yet recent developments in posthumanist and radical ecological thought challenge this formulation to the core. If the ‘human subject’ is, in fact, itself an assemblage of multiple beings and processes, and if our livelihoods utterly depend on the sustenance provided by more-than-human others, then economic agency cannot be understood merely in terms of human choice. This chapter maps out three conceptual strategies – inclusion, extension, and distribution – by which diverse economy scholars have begun to challenge and reconfigure the notions of agency and livelihood. Each of these strategies has key strengths and limitations, and ultimately they may point toward a radical challenge to the very concept of ‘economy’ itself.