The problem with agency – a Colin Hay double feature

On 22^nd and 23^rd of January, the Environmental Politics Research Group had the honor of welcoming Colin Hay, Professor of Political Sciences at Sciences Po Paris, at the University of Vienna. Hay is a political theorist who has written extensively on, among other topics, the issues of globalization, the development of the welfare state and political disengagement. He is regarded as one of the founders of constructivist institutionalism and developed his conception of discursive selectivities in the 2002 book ‘Political Analysis. A Critical Introduction’. We invited Colin Hay to further develop and discuss the concept of selectivities in the context of multilateral environmental negotiations – the latter being a research focus of the ongoing ERC-funded project TwinPolitics. The program of Hay’s visit consisted of a public IPW lecture on Thursday evening and a workshop on Friday, where researchers were invited to discuss their projects with Prof. Hay and Prof. Vadrot (PI of TwinPolitics) and exchange ideas on how the concept of selectivity can connect different research areas.

Written by Felix Nütz

Part I – in search of the missing subject

In a room overflowing with expectant listeners, Professor Hay gave a public lecture ‘Homo politicus and the ‘problem of agency’: the missing subject of modern political science’ (moderated by Alice Vadrot). He presented some arguments that he already developed in his most recent publication ‘What is politics? The Definitive Guide to Politics in Our Polarized Times’. At the heart of the lecture lay the concept of agency, which describes the human capacity to make political choices in complex contexts. According to Hay, agency is too often ignored in accounts and explanations of political processes. The result is the removal of homo politicus, i.e. the human as a political being, from modern political science. In its place, many researchers use assumptions from other disciplines such as economics, resulting, for example, in the famous concept of profit-maximizing homo oeconomicus. These assumptions often side-step the ‘problem of agency’ and seek to determine political behaviour based on the actor’s characteristics and position in society.

In one moment that drew laughter from the audience, Hay suggested that political science papers should actually be longer, not shorter, to include explanations that would match the lay conception of the term. Citing his own work on correlations between certain attitudes among the public and their vote for Brexit, Hay argued that political science should go beyond merely stating correlations and instead provide credible political stories that explain why people act as they do. While quantitative analysis can show that those declaring a mix of strong anti-neoliberal sentiments, neo-conservative sentiments, and economic nostalgia are significantly more likely to vote for Brexit, this does not actually provide an explanation for Brexit or voting in favour of Brexit. The mere calculation of probability and correlation reduces the political actor to specific characteristics she possesses and excludes the rich diversity of political choices and agencies available to her.

The discussion was opened by Fabio Wolkenstein, Head of Department at the Institute for Political Science, who offered a series of critical reflections on the lecture, and Hay’s understanding of explanation and causation from a lay perspective in particular. This quickly sparked a lively exchange, moving from questions of critical realism to the agency of animals and the long-standing structure-agency debate.

Part II – discussing selectivity, or playing golf in the dark

The next day, twelve researchers from different disciplines and institutions reconvened for the workshop ‘Selectivity in Environmental Politics’. The goal was to explore applications of the concept of selectivity, as developed by Bob Jessop (1990), Colin Hay (2002), and Alice Vadrot (2014, 2017), to the field of environmental politics. The term refers to the fact that political processes and institutions are selective: they focus on some problems and include certain actors and interests, while leaving others out. Studying how these selectivities work helps to explain how political decisions are made within institutions, while also allowing a critical assessment of how these processes could be made more inclusive.

In the introduction to the workshop, Professors Hay and Vadrot expanded on their respective works on discursive and epistemic selectivity, and why they chose to work with the selectivities concept in their academic career. Hay used the analogy of playing golf in the dark during an earthquake to emphasize the difficulties for political actors to make sense of the context in which they act. While the context is constantly changing (the earthquake), our knowledge of it is ever partial (the darkness), and actions have intended as well as unintended consequences (actors do not know if the golf ball they hit will go into the hole). This analogy served to illustrate the importance of cognitive processes and discourse for political explanation, since it is by these means that actors try to make sense of their environment.

Vadrot explained how she came to extend the concept of selectivity to the epistemic level, i.e. to different knowledge forms, because of her empirical experience from following the negotiations to establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). While there was previously no consensus on what the term biodiversity concretely meant, the IPBES negotiations quickly shifted towards framing biodiversity as ecosystem services, thus highlighting its economic value. The term epistemic selectivity helps to explain how actors who previously did not subscribe to the framing of ecosystem services started to use that language to be included in the IPBES process.  After this introduction followed presentations by the participants who talked about their own research.

Simon Lobach, guest researcher at the Institute of Political Science, spoke of his field work at aluminum mining sites in Brazil. Among them was a site in Belém, where COP 30 of the UNFCCC took place in 2025. He shared his experience of attending the negotiations without access to the formal negotiation venue, instead focusing his attention on the aluminum industry’s efforts of framing the material as ‘green’ to the public.

Matteo de Donà, Science Diplomacy Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, presented his research on the International Seabed Authority (ISA). He examined the self-legitimization of the ISA’s new Secretary General Carvalho in her speeches, focusing on epistemic severing between the ISA and the BBNJ treaty.

Dominik von Gehlen, doctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, presented work on discourses of sustainable investment. His research showed among other things how investments in armaments became part of the sustainability discourse since the Russian invasion in Ukraine.

Mekhala Dave shared her fieldwork experience from studying the ISA in Kingston, Jamaica, in her PhD project. She explored how epistemic selectivity leads to the false idea of epistemic trust at the ISA, which culminates in the exclusion of different knowledge forms.

I myself (Felix Nütz, TwinPolitics doctoral researcher) had the honor of presenting my research on the negotiations for a global plastics treaty, which I followed in 2024 (link to blog) and 2025 (link to blog). From my ethnographic observations, I developed an interest in the questions why certain topics – such as fossil feedstock dependence of plastics – remained outside of formal negotiations, and how the talks effectively got stuck despite the overwhelming evidence of the harms caused by plastics. I believe that the concept of selectivity can help answer some of these questions. This is because it enables us to analyse which strategies, discourses and forms of knowledge are (not) represented in negotiations and how certain strategies are selected to shape the final agreement.

The presentations in the workshop showed the different approaches researchers employed to investigate negotiations, with some focusing on the more formal part of official statements, and others examining the informal spaces and activities that usually accompany such events. In the discussions, it was emphasized that an ethnographic approach is useful for researching negotiation sites (see Hughes & Vadrot, 2023, for a conceptualization of negotiations that includes an ethnographic approach).

Studying multilateral environmental negotiations seems particularly relevant in times where they are increasingly contested and multilateralism is generally perceived as being under pressure. Analyzing the strategies of actors both in formal and informal negotiation spaces can help us understand some of these contestations, while bearing in mind the position of negotiations within the global political order.

Finally, these issues also connect to the objectives of the TwinPolitics project, which explores the future use of Digital Twins in multilateral negotiations. Digital Twins, despite their claim to exactly copy the environment, are strongly selective in which data they include. The question then remains whether they can be tools for a more inclusive politics or whether they reinforce the logic of elite-driven policymaking.

As Environmental Politics Research Group, we are thankful to all participants for their input and discussion and hope the workshop inspires new ideas and more discussions in the future.

 

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Additional Reading 

• Hay, C. (2002). Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction. Springer.
• Hay, C. (2024). Imagining Brexit, reimagining Britain. British Politics, 19(4), 473-493.
• Hay, C. (2025). What is Politics? The Definitive Guide to Politics in Our Polarized Times. Polity.
• Hughes, H., Vadrot, A. (2023). Concepts: Selecting, Applying and Innovating Concepts. In: Hughes H, Vadrot ABM, eds. Conducting Research on Global Environmental Agreement-Making. Cambridge University Press; 2023:58-73.
• Jessop, B. (1990). State theory : putting the capitalist state in its place. Polity Press
• Vadrot, A. (2014). The politics of knowledge and global biodiversity. Routledge.
• Vadrot, A. (2017). Knowledge, International Relations and the structure–agency debate: towards the concept of “epistemic selectivities”. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research. 30. 1-12. 10.1080/13511610.2016.1226787.