The role of agency in development planning and the development process: Introduction to the special issue on agency and development

Agency in the context of a complex social world
This article introduces ‘agency’ and its role in development debates and development planning. Our main aim is to set out the context for the papers in this collection, which we also introduce along the way. In the first part, we define and discuss agency; in the second part, we contextualise the case study examples in this Special Issue of IDPR with examples of gender and autonomy; in the third part, we raise the difficult issues of democracy and reflexivity and conclude with further examples. The theme is a huge one, but our main focus is on what our collected papers have brought to the table of the agency debates. We also have our own axe to grind, arguing the case for a scientific realism that acknowledges the complexity of agency at several levels in society. The agency argument, embedded in scientific realism, is developed here as a review of some basic issues that often arise because of competing paradigms within development studies.