By Jeanette Garcia Kola, Research Ireland PhD Candidate, University College Dublin

“Our experience suggests that understanding young people’s evolving voice and agency requires methodological diversity, but above all, time, trust, and relationships because it is the combination of these elements.” – Sally Youssef (GAGE, ODI Global)

The Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) programme brought a wide-ranging body of longitudinal research to this year’s Development Studies Association conference. The panel session on “Uncertain futures and young people: Exploring the polycrisis through ethnographic and longitudinal research” held on the morning of Thursday 9^th of July moved beyond asking whether young people have agency, onto what forms of agency are actually possible, for whom, and under what conditions. I walked in this panel expecting evidence about agency and its shifting presence across times of crisis, I walked out convinced that agency, measured in the abstract, is almost the wrong thing to measure at all.

Convened by Kate Pincock (ODI) and Nicola Jones (ODI GAGE) and moderated by young peer researchers from the GAGE programme, the panel pulled together longitudinal and ethnographic work from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Gaza, and the Syrian displacement into Jordan and Lebanon. It landed neatly inside this year’s DSA theme of reimagining development around power, agency and futures in an uncertain world. Running through nearly every presentation was the quiet act of refusal to let “agency” collapse into a synonym for “resilience”. When young people survive displacement, violence and the collapse of the services around them and still keep going, agency cannot be understood apart from the structural conditions that shape it.

The distinction between agency and resilience was sharpest in Matthew Remedios (University of Oxford) and Vithushan Fernando (University of Colombia)’s research on youth in Mannar, in post-war northern Sri Lanka. They argued that “inclusive” post-war development (i.e. skills training, wind energy, aquaculture, sand mining) has absorbed young people into the economy while rendering their labour surplus to it, a condition they termed chronic irrelevance.

The presenters noted how the capacity to push back on chronic irrelevance is not shared out evenly. Among the young people who could organise and protest, including the movement against wind-energy projects, the majority of the makeup were notably university-educated. Meanwhile, another whole layer of youth, those doing gravel and sand mining from dawn, could be better represented but have reportedly  had no time for any of the social initiatives and protests. Remedios and Fernando raised a good example where participation, even in the limited online sphere, where respondents such as a young man could post his certificate, exam results, or new motorbike, all still require a smartphone and mobile data. This highlights how the very channels where academia seeks to engage with youth “voice” and sample participants are already filtering who we find. Agency, put bluntly, is partly a question of who gets seen.

From Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where the 2020-2022 conflict killed hundreds of thousands and displaced well over a million, Kate Pincock, Nicola Jones and Workneh Yadete (Quest) collaborated to reframe agency as something adaptive. The researchers likened agency to decisions made inside a box that keeps shrinking. The most memorable point from this longitudinal study is how differently that box is shaped for girls and boys. While girls exercised agency by negotiating to stay in school, resisting forced marriage, and shouldering caregiving and community-recovery roles, boys showed agency by taking on income generation when household livelihoods vanished, protecting family members, migrating for work, and sometimes joining armed groups. Set against rising child marriage, the re-emergence of FGM, climate change and sharper risks of sexual violence, agency is reframed as constrained navigation, one which can only really be understood by holding gender and age in view at the same time.

“It seems to appear that young people’s agency is kind of truncated in the current context.” -Anita Ghimire (NISER)

Anita Ghimire’s work on Nepal’s Gen Z movement was the panel’s most hopeful note, and its methodological heart. By following the same young people from grade six to grade twelve, the research made the gap between generations much more visible. Under this study, the researchers put the same tools, social network mapping, “most significant change” and life-history interviews, to parents as well. After the September 2025 protests against corruption and nepotism, presenters noted that as parents stayed largely pessimistic, young people evidently held onto a cautious, watchful hope. This research posits that crisis can be the thing that switches youth political agency on and pulls them into public life for the first time – precisely when politics finally speaks to their own lives.

The Gaza research, presented by Bassam Abu Hamad  (Al-Quds University) with Joost Vintges (GAGE ODI Global), pushed hardest on the whole idea of resilience, because the conditions are so extreme. Drawing on mixed-methods work with around 1,380 young people aged 10 to 24, it laid out food and water insecurity, collapsed healthcare, and the worst outcomes concentrated among girls (married adolescents especially), orphans, and young people with disabilities. The reframing here was to move resilience out of the individual and into the community. The argument presented was that people stay not because they have run out of options, but out of collective solidarity, and it is that solidarity that holds the young. Kristen Hope (University of Bath), who researches displaced Gazan adolescents in Cairo, pushed the point toward epistemic justice in asking how do researchers position themselves when the knowledge they produce is generated under occupation and genocide, and is never neutral. Another question on disability surfaced a forthcoming GAGE paper on the collapse of what had been a sophisticated disability-care system, and what it means to acquire a disability where almost no care is left.

Two threads tie all of these observations back to methodology. Firstly, intersecting identities (i.e. gender, class, disability, marital status, displacement) collectively add colour and, more importantly, decide which forms of agency are on the table. Second, none of these identities can adequately enrich research if time is not accounted for as a variable. As Sally Youssef put it, “tracking how voice evolves takes methodological range”.

This method of tracking involves arts-based and visual methods, both of which turns out to be essential for the most sensitive ground of gender-based violence, sexuality, sectarianism and religion. This intersectionality relies heavily on established trust and relationships with research participants. Agency being non-linear is a point I will carry forward. The supporting example of young people sounding more hopeful in earlier interview waves and more constrained in latter phases, which the research team read not as agency lost but as agency recalibrated against a changing world, reminds me of the critical thinking and deconstruction that research methodologies and analyses require.

So I left the panel with Sally’s question rather than a tidy conclusion, which feels fitting for a panel about uncertain futures. As we move away from asking whether young people have agency, as research presented clearly demonstrate that they do, we can now ask a harder and more useful question: “What forms of agency are possible, for whom, and under what conditions?”

By Jeanette Garcia Kola, Research Ireland PhD Candidate, University College Dublin