This article serves as a commentary on Michael Hallsworth's 2023 piece, ‘A manifesto for applying behavioural science,’ featured in Nature Human Behaviour. The manifesto was prompted by methodological, practical and normative critiques directed at behavioural science and its role in public policy. In this commentary, I argue that the manifesto presents numerous insightful and constructive reform proposals regarding the scope, methods and values in behavioural science, which can help advance the field of behavioural public policy. While there is much to agree with, I contend in this commentary that applied behavioural science can and should delve deeper into the study of socially and culturally embedded processes of goal formation. Additionally, it should explore the institutional conditions necessary for individuals to formulate their goals competently and in a self-determined manner.

The Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD) works with countries worldwide to implement testing in the areas of science, mathematics and reading through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) every three years, and this process is recognised to influence education systems through areas such as curriculum. Over the past decade, the OECD increasingly has acknowledged the need to include a greater emphasis on environmental issues, including developing student competencies specifically in this area. For the 2025 PISA round, we were invited as environmental science education experts to contribute to the Science Framework, which underpins the science assessment. This paper explains how we responded to that invitation, including foregrounding the urgent need to understand the competencies of 15 year-olds to address critical socio-ecological challenges such as climate change. We argue that this provides environmental education practitioners and scholars with a powerful opportunity to gain world-scale data for research and advocacy, which could enhance the visibility and leverage for our field in curriculum, whilst also recognising the political process within which we were engaged.

Mutual support among residents in collaborative housing for older people presents an alternative care model to family or formal social care provided in individuals’ homes or specialised care facilities. This is particularly the case in cohousing, where residents commit to mutual support and exercise autonomy through self-governance. Cohousing also supports the ageing processes by fostering greater wellbeing and significantly lessening social isolation and loneliness. Further, it offers the potential for older people to collectively maintain greater agency in later life and manage age-related health decline. Despite a growing body of literature on ageing and collaborative housing, to date little research has explored how later-life transitions are negotiated among residents of collaborative housing. Drawing on longitudinal, qualitative research on collaborative housing communities in England between 2021 and 2023, this article examines age-related challenges residents face in cohousing, and how they respond to such changing care needs individually and collectively. Analysing data from two waves of fieldwork in three cohousing communities, it examines how the mutual-support functions of the communities act as an intermediary to facilitate communication with different parties, formal and informal care provision and decision-making. The intermediary role tends not to replace the need for formal social care or the involvement of family but provides a supportive buffer between the individual and the family and formal services. Despite the lack of built-in care services placing a potentially heavier burden on residents, the ‘intentional’ commitment to mutual support in cohousing contributes significantly to extending agency in later life.

In the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, there is a pronounced paradigm shift associated with the transition from internalism to externalism. The externalist paradigm views cognitive processes as not isolated in the brain, but as interrelated with external artefacts and structures. The paper focuses on one of the leading externalist approaches – extended cognition. Despite the dominance of internalism in economics, in its main schools, there is an emerging trend towards extended cognition ideas. In my opinion, economists might develop the most advanced version of the extended cognition approach: socially extended cognition based on cognitive institutions. This paper analyses extended cognition ideas in institutional, Austrian, and behavioural economics and identifies numerous overlapping approaches and complementary research areas. I argue that the economics of cognitive institutions is a promising field for all economic schools and propose a preliminary research agenda.

Women who are currently serving in a variety of combat roles and combat support positions in many state militaries around the globe have had to struggle for their positions by proving their abilities, and such struggles are still ongoing. Based on interview materials with veterans, this article examines the ways in which the veterans interpret their roles as women in combat positions and how they understand agency. The article further traces how their presence in war could alter the gendered meaning of protection. While the military is a key institution of overt gendered power in the state, women combatants’ voices can create a crack in the masculine dominance that is taken for granted in state narratives; they can also create a wedge that allows in a reconsideration of gendered roles and power relations in the context of militaries, thereby offering more nuanced interpretations of protection and agency.

This is a response to the engagement of scholars with my argument in my book, Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture. I expand on my argument about the way that the novel form can nuance Orientalist or Eurocentric assumptions about freedom, the links between neoliberalism and Hindu Nationalism, whether a theory of freedom that takes into account the constraining contexts through which agency is produced can ever include rebellion, and the contradictory discourses and contested subjectivities through which agency is constituted.

Intelligent machines – from automated robots to algorithmic systems – can create images and poetry, steer our preferences, aid decision making, and kill. Our perception of their capacities, relative autonomy, and moral status will profoundly affect not only how we interpret and address practical problems in world politics over the next 50 years but also how we prescribe and evaluate individual and state responses. In this article, I argue that we must analyse this emerging synthetic agency in order to effectively navigate – and theorise – the future of world politics. I begin by outlining the ways that agency has been under-theorised within the discipline of International Relations (IR) and suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts prevailing conceptions. I then examine how individual human beings and formal organisations – purposive actors with which IR is already familiar – qualify as moral agents, or bearers of duties, and explore what criteria intelligent machines would need to meet to also qualify. After demonstrating that synthetic agents currently lack the ‘reflexive autonomy’ required for moral agency, I turn to the context of war to illustrate how insights drawn from this comparative analysis counter our tendency to elide different manifestations of moral agency in ways that erode crucial notions of responsibility in world politics.

The ongoing debate within neuroethics concerning the degree to which neuromodulation such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) changes the personality, identity, and agency (PIA) of patients has paid relatively little attention to the perspectives of prospective patients. Even less attention has been given to pediatric populations. To understand patients’ views about identity changes due to DBS in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the authors conducted and analyzed semistructured interviews with adolescent patients with OCD and their parents/caregivers. Patients were asked about projected impacts to PIA generally due to DBS. All patient respondents and half of caregivers reported that DBS would impact patient self-identity in significant ways. For example, many patients expressed how DBS could positively impact identity by allowing them to explore their identities free from OCD. Others voiced concerns that DBS-related resolution of OCD might negatively impact patient agency and authenticity. Half of patients expressed that DBS may positively facilitate social access through relieving symptoms, while half indicated that DBS could increase social stigma. These views give insights into how to approach decision-making and informed consent if DBS for OCD becomes available for adolescents. They also offer insights into adolescent experiences of disability identity and “normalcy” in the context of OCD.

What changes in the conceptualization of God, the ultimate healer, once God himself becomes the object of healing? This article examines the delicate tensions between divine and human agency in the Lurianic kabbalah, focusing on its grammar of action, and the complex relations between the subjects and the objects of this action. Rather than analyzing the relations between the kabbalists and their God through their conscious perceptions, the article explores how these relations emerge from the Lurianic discursive configurations and describes the role of medical discourse in their shaping. I claim that in order to perceive the transformation in the image of God in this early modern kabbalistic corpus, we should place at the heart of our inquiry the questions of who the patient is in the Lurianic medical clinic and how the relations between the human and the divine protagonists of the Lurianic drama are woven in this clinic.