Human Agency to Navigate the Anthropocene

We live in a highly interdependent world. Despite a slowdown in economic globalization, complex global interdependencies are deepening, supercharged by digital technologies and humans’ pressures on our planet, giving rise to new planetary-level challenges. Warming temperatures, viruses, or digitally spread misinformation, do not stop at national borders. Yet today, collective action on challenges ranging from climate change mitigation to peace and security, is frustratingly slow. Lack of trust and polarization within and across societies, associated with perceptions of insecurity and heightened feelings of distress, exacerbates the gridlock.

Why is humankind failing to collaborate and contain a growing number of social, economic, ecological, and technological challenges? The 2023-2024 Human Development Report (HDR) warns that our collective failure to leverage human potential and collective action to mitigate climate change and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals is due to an ‘agency gap’—the disparity between perceived and actual possibilities. According to the HDR, human agency, that is “people’s ability to determine for themselves what it means to live a good life, including defining and reassessing their responsibilities to other people and the planet”, has depleted in many ways. Reimagining cooperation and achieving collective action to address global challenges hinges on closing these agency gaps, that is enabling people to feel more secure and more in control over their lives and our collective future.

With the 2023-2024 as a guiding point, this event will discuss what reimagining cooperation in a polarizing world looks like, and how expanding human agency may help. Building on last year’s successful event held on 22 February 2023 at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Human Development, Sustainability and Agency, this year’s Austrian HDR 2023-2024 launch event will feature experts exploring the notion of sustainable agency, that involves intentionally and positively influencing the wellbeing of others, including future generations and non-human life forms, beyond self-centric desires.