Navigating Challenges in Forming Grassroots Women's Groups: Exploring the Struggles of Building Collective Agency and Capabilities in a Rural Context

Abstract

Collective action is often treated as a desirable and scalable outcome of participatory initiatives, yet far less attention has been paid to the conditions under which collective agency fails to consolidate. This article examines how collective agency is initiated but ultimately unravels within a grassroots women's initiative in a rural, crisis‐affected, and digitally mediated context. Drawing on a qualitative case study analyzed through Ibrahim's 3C model, we trace how individual awareness, communal vision, participatory engagement, and communal responsibility unfolded across the phases of conscientization, conciliation, and the attempted transition toward collaboration. The findings show that collective agency did not emerge as a linear or cumulative process. Although conscientization and inclusive participation were successfully activated, the conciliation phase became a critical bottleneck. Weak relational foundations, procedural ambiguity, leadership misalignment, and structural constraints prevented the consolidation of communal responsibility, generating nonlinear dynamics such as repeated deliberation without decision, unresolved questions of collective purpose, and growing emotional fatigue. These dynamics ultimately blocked the transition toward collaboration with external actors and led to process disintegration. By foregrounding failure rather than success, the article makes a primary contribution to understanding fragile collective agency and failed consolidation. It also offers three related insights: a processual account of how grassroots initiatives may stall despite strong initial mobilization; an analytical specification of conciliation as a decisive and vulnerable phase in collective capability formation; and a methodological demonstration of how the 3C framework, combined with fine‐grained qualitative analysis, can capture interrupted and failed collective processes. Beyond women's studies, the findings speak to broader debates on fragile collective action and the limits of participatory organizing in digitally mediated and crisis contexts, with implications for facilitation practices and the design of programs and policies.