Empowerment

Empowerment is a term with a history that has emerged recently in modified and revitalized form. Its origins can be found in the politics of recognition in liberal societies during the 1960s. The civil rights struggle of Black people in America, and the emergence of feminist theory both relied on the notion of empowerment to portray liberal democracies as incomplete or insufficient in recognizing the full rights of all citizens. One repercussion of the radical formulations of empowerment in the West during the 1960s and early 1970s was that empowerment also entered the vocabulary of some Left-leaning development organizations, such as Oxfam, during that period. Throughout the 1970s, empowerment became a mainstay for thinking about progressive practice in a number of public service professions such as medical care and education, influenced by Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In education, progressive workers took from Freire a desire not solely to transfer knowledge, but to facilitate an expanded self-realization of the student as a person capable of transforming society as much as integrating into it.

After a period of abeyance in the 1980s, empowerment has once again become a key political term, but it has reemerged changed. There is no straightforward definition of empowerment. It serves as a normative and evaluative tool to understand the politics of the role of ordinary people. Perhaps the best way to gain ready purchase on the term is to situate it in a growing lexicon of complementary and supportive terms: participation, democratization, and ownership. We can explore the meaning of empowerment by looking at some specific political processes and reflecting on its more problematic aspects.

Empowerment has become a reference in three key areas of contemporary governance. However, even after a brief review of these, our understanding of empowerment will remain rather slippery as the term fixes itself in different forms depending on the context.

1. Throughout the 1990s, a widespread revival in civic activism challenged military regimes, swept away communist states, and forced self-declared life presidents to the ballot box. A sensibility that societies were reinvigorated with civic energy because of the end of the Cold War led people to revive the notion of empowerment as a process that promoted liberal democratic politics throughout the world. “Empowering civil society” came to constitute a contemporary (John) Lockean ideal to discipline the state and promote liberal-civic cultures, whether in the form of velvet revolutions, national conferences, or public demonstrations. In this context, empowerment is based in a revival of liberalism on a global scale, expressed as a desire to see (proto) citizens voluntarily acting in nonviolent ways to enhance their democratic rights and to exercise some form of check on state power.

2. As part of this broad liberal zeitgeist, empowerment reenters the vocabulary of development politics and policy during the 1990s. Here, it attains a more practical meaning. Development policy has been mostly formulated in apolitical terms: Questions of technical proficiency, bureaucratic planning, and socioeconomic returns have dominated development policy thinking. It is striking that an integration of explicitly political concerns became development policy in the 1990s. One can see this most readily in the profusion of World Bank (the leading development policy and research agency) research on governance and related phrases. In 2002, the World Bank published the Empowerment Sourcebook, which details the ways in which empowerment—particularly of the poor—is key to successful development policy. Briefly, the political logic is as follows: Successful development projects require a fuller engagement by the targets of the project. This engagement requires that recipients of a project attain the requisite level of awareness of mobilization to support the project. This [Page 272]process of attainment is encapsulated by empowerment here. The process relates to practical concerns about information sharing, local contributions to support the project, and the generation of local resources, whether tangible or in the form of social capital.

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