Empowerment in Development: Where are we at now?
This article was published in UNSW’s biannual International Affairs Journal, Politik, in Issue 1, 2021.
Article starts on pg. 40 — https://www.unswpolitik.com/_files/ugd/08c433_c5aa10d5306a4d1e8486a45f3f709bd7.pdf
Introduction
In the global development arena of today, approaches centred around empowerment are a major point of contention for academics, development practitioners and communities. Empowerment has appeared everywhere since it first entered socio-political lexicon, from social justice movements to neoliberal ideology, to local governments and the World Bank. Empowerment has become such a prevalent term and was a transformative concept in development studies and practice. But alongside evolving power relations between and within development actors and communities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, empowerment has also changed drastically. Looking to South Asia and Latin America, both prevalent regions in the development scope, we can see how empowerment approaches have both succeeded and failed, and how perspectives and awareness are central to doing empowerment-based development approaches justice as we look forward to better, more inclusive development practices.
The Rise of Empowerment
The conceptualisations of empowerment-based development that came about in the 60s and 70s were undeniably transformative. The notion that empowerment was in fact a socio-political construct (Batliwala 2007), was so important in shifting the focus away from top-down approaches and acknowledging the power of grassroots approaches (Christens 2019). By the 1990s, empowerment had become a central element of the ideology surrounding social change and development, upheld in liberation theology, black power movements, and most prominently in feminist movements (Batliwala 2007). In South Asia, empowerment approaches were responsible for many feminist progressions in the late 20th century, creating pivotal development initiatives for poor, marginalised women. Past development interventions viewed women simply as recipients of the service, whereas empowerment initiatives created an opportunity for “women to collectivise around shared experiences of poverty, exclusion, and discrimination, critically analyse the structures and ideologies that sustained and reinforced their oppression, and raise consciousness of their own sense of subordination” (Batliwala 2007, p. 560). In India in the 1990s, this saw grassroots women mobilise into sanghs or samoohs (local terms for collectives or informal organisations). They did this to address their unequal access to economic and natural resources, education, health care, employment rights and respect in relation to caste, religious background, and gender (Batliwala 2007). Micro-credit programmes, for example, allowed for higher income rates, which in turn improved health and education levels in these communities. These collectives also started campaigns to address violence against women, which pushed for law reform for better representations of women in local governments, and around dowry harassment and domestic violence (Batliwala 2007). In 1993, women waste pickers from the city of Pune formed a trade union called the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP). In the years since, the women have effectively established their crucial roles in stimulating the local economy, protecting the environment, and aiding local waste management. Through their empowerment-based unionisation, the women have access to life insurance cover, identity cards (which grant them access to interest-free micro-credit loans and education for their children), upskilling resources, wage protection, and protection from discrimination or violence from local law enforcement (Full Circle 2010).
An Infiltration of Neoliberalism
However, it is argued that despite its promising beginnings, empowerment as a tool for development has been affected by a ‘conceptual creep’ from its collectivist origins towards a more individualised concept (Christens 2019). This ‘de-politicisation’ of empowerment has been criticised for the way that it has diluted empowerment approaches into narrow, purely technocratic solutions (Batliwala 2007), which are susceptible to the influence of economic and political agendas. As the popularity of empowerment approaches grew, so too did its tendency to be a buzzword, and to be viewed as a fix-all in the eyes of state actors and NGOs. It became used as a route for rapid local development that looked good on paper, rather than a process that prioritised long-term sustainable development initiatives. There is evidence that although the original intentions of the aforementioned micro-credit programmes were good, they have not resulted in significant local development. Instead, we are seeing “growing indebtedness, doubling and tripling of women’s workloads, and new forms of gendered violence” (Batliwala 2007, p. 562). Although we want to shift away from top-down development approaches, the bottom-up approach of these micro-credit programs actually reinforce the marginalisation of the poor “by holding them responsible for ending their poverty” (Khurshid 2016, p. 622). The very convenient neoliberal ideology of empowerment as a way for communities to take care of their own affairs has unfortunately been widely adopted in development practice in India. As a result, the empowerment movements seen in the 1970s and 1980s has faded and the expectation is that individuals can be empowered by themselves. Now, empowerment approaches have been manipulated and co-opted by dominant political interests, and existing power hierarchies have instead been consolidated (Batliwala 2007). Empowerment today is polarised in regions like South Asia; on one hand, it can represent the anti-colonial activism and access to rights and equality, but it can also be a mechanism of neoliberal self-governance (Sharma 2008). Moreover, these poles seem to align with the ‘empowerment’ discourses of the Global North versus the Global South and makes the disconnect between them uncomfortably visible.
Empowerment on the Micro-level
Generally, in development, power and empowerment are conceptualised on a macro-level, which means that empowerment-based development programs often lack the small-scale details needed for the micro-level communities they are being applied to. Since the 1980s, we have seen how international development practitioners have realised the limitations of focusing only on macro-level “economic measures to support and sustain the development of different nations” (Khurshid 2016, p. 261). Now, more varied avenues of empowerment-based development are being pursued, such as education-based programs. In their work with the Centre for the Study of Equity and Governance in Health Systems (CEGSS) in Guatemala, Flores 2019 discusses the problems around applying macro-level empowerment frameworks to micro-level development initiatives for “reducing social exclusion and inequality in health care” (Flores 2019, p. 182). Flores 2019 highlights how CEGSS had to reconfigure their analysis of power from the traditional macro-level approach to the micro-level, focusing on power relations within and between their organisation, the communities they were working with, the socio-cultural and political structures that surrounded them, and all individuals involved (Flores 2019). Within their analysis, Flores’ team encountered a gender disparity problem in their empowerment-based regional training workshops, wherein young women, who were active participants in their health communities, were not attending the workshops. CEGSS was providing a subsidy for the women to attend, but it was only for the one participant, which meant that it would have been insufficient in covering the costs if they needed to bring their children along, or if they had to travel for multiple days away from their townships (Flores 2019). The problem Flores 2019 encountered truly emphasises the ‘crossroads’ faced by so many women in developing countries, wherein “intersections of gender, race and social class provoke an accumulation of inequalities that may make it hard to surpass the obstacles [they] face in their pursuit of pathways of empowerment,” (Gonçalves 2014, p. 210). Despite pushback within the organisation, CEGGS created a differentiated subsidy for the women traveling with children to amend this problem. Of course, the original subsidy was much easier to manage administratively however, CEGSS chose to favour their development practice instead, to continue to empower the women in this community (Flores 2019). Without the micro-level analysis of power and empowerment conducted within this community, CEGSS would not have been aware of the specific inequality they were unintentionally exacerbating, and they were able to successfully account for the nuanced, local power relations they were interacting with. Not only does this example highlight the potential for development practitioners to succumb to the convenience of the technocratic process, but it also shows that micro-level approaches to empowerment are more effective in achieving justice for the minority groups most affected by the socio-political issues of the local community.
Conclusion
Overall, we have seen how much the concept of empowerment in the development scope has changed in the 80-odd years since its introduction. So too has the effectiveness of empowerment changed, being upheld by people and organisations with varying intentions, with very different outcomes over the years. The original strength held by the pioneers of empowerment as a tool for social change, and later global development, has evolved drastically, to a place that many critics would consider quite unfortunate given the great prospects it once had. As seen in the example of empowering women as an approach to development in India, empowerment was pivotal in addressing socio-political equalities and mobilising communities to take action. But as time has gone on, it seems as if macro-level empowerment has been hijacked by the bureaucratic and technocratic preferences of state structures and processes. To ensure that empowerment does not fade away completely, we must avoid the temptation of succumbing to the ease of neoliberal economic and political ideology, as seen in the example of how CEGSS chose to operate in Guatemala. On top of this, organisations and development practitioners need to foster the growth of micro-level approaches in development practice, which allows for the specificities, nuance and consideration of minority groups to be incorporated within these in-need communities in which development is taking place.
References
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Full Circle, 2010, short documentary, by Amit Kumar Raj, distributed by Culture Unplugged.
Gonçalves, T, 2014, ‘Crossroads of Empowerment: The Organization of Women Domestic Workers in Brazil’, in Edwards, J & Cornwall, A (eds), Feminisms, Empowerment and Development: Changing Womens Lives, Zed Books, London, pp. 210–227, accessed 10 April 2021 via ProQuest Ebook Central, ISBN: 9781780325859
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La Ferriere, K, Waste picker in Pune, India, digital photograph, World Resources Institute, accessed 1 July 2021, <{ HYPERLINK https://www.wri.org/insights/urban-transformations-pune-india-waste-pickers-go-trash-treasure}>
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