The capacity for leadership, including political leadership, to improve development outcomes has attracted recent interest within development studies and associated donor agencies. This new approach is a welcome critique of the broadly institutionalist outlook of the good governance agenda; however, there is a mismatch between the desire to 'bring the agency back in' and the commitment of the Developmental Leadership Programme's (DLP's) to positivism, and, despite claims to the contrary, structuralism. Instead, I argue that interpretivism, with its emphasis on the meanings and beliefs of human actors, can augment this approach by providing a fundamentally different view of the agency question that sits at the heart of the DLP's research programme. To illustrate this point, I draw from my own research into the life stories of politicians from the Pacific Islands. In contrast to the dead weight of multiple variables and formal laws, I find that political life is embedded within the distinctively human realm of interpersonal action and that while leaders implicitly believe in their own agency, they also commonly experience a sense of powerlessness that stems in no small part from the inherent contingency and uncertainty of all policy-making.