A Human Basis for Sustainable Development: How Psychosocial Change at the Individual Level Promotes Development

Sociocultural and economic limitations often deprive individuals of the freedoms to make decisions regarding their lives, hindering development. This article presents the Framework for Enabling Empowerment (FrEE), a model that emphasizes the importance of psychosocial factors and the individual in accessing freedoms and promoting health, productivity, and sustainable human development. FrEE is theoretically based in Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach. Explaining the synergy between the context, the person, and psychosocial factors, FrEE provides a strategy to achieve the expansion of individual choice and freedoms. The authors present FrEE and its relationship to Sen’s theories and explain how FrEE makes the Capability Approach operative. Finally the authors draw on empirical program evaluations in Mexico to discuss FrEE’s potential impact on the field of human development.