Freedom and Agency: The Importance of Time and Relations for Development

In this chapter I would like to contribute to the dialogue on human dignity and development by exploring human freedom and agency as experienced in action, as real-time processes within factual constraints, uncertainties, and ambivalences and in relation, embedded in a story of relations with things, with others, and with inner drivers of human decisions and choices (needs, evidence, aspirations, and motivations) that encompass and transcend material conditions. Inner drivers, however hard to define, are easy to recognize in practice; development itself is hard to encapsulate in a definition yet easy to recognize with reference to elemental human experience.