Spirals of Perpetual Potential: How Empowerment Projects' Noble Missions Tangle in Everyday Interaction (original) (raw)

Exploring the nexus between participation and empowerment

Exploring the nexus between participation and empowerment, 2020

Theoretically, the idea of participation might appear to be replete with grand-sounding promises of empowerment for the poor and marginalised. But, in practice, participation may often take the form of enlisting people in various social and community development projects to secure the compliance of local people. In this paper, I offer a critical review of theoretical promises of participation and contrast this with a number of real world examples. I argue that participation can be used for validating external approach and incorporated in social as well as community development projects to make it more cost effective. In theory, giving voices to the poor is important but tokenistic inclusion can often found in practice for cost-effectiveness. However, giving voices and/or cost efficiency arguments are not coherent with the ideas of empowerment while practices of participation often fail to address the issues of power among various actors such as decision-makers, participation seekers and the participants. When participation is used as a prerequisite to secure fund or make the project cost-effective, empowerment of the poor people does not seem to be a genuine priority. Therefore, empowerment through participation may remain as a lip-service.

Journal of Civil Society The mantra of empowerment talk: an essay

Projects around the world use the ‘mantra of empowerment talk’, calling for engagement that is civic, appreciative of local diversity, transformative, sustainably self-reliant, helpful for alleviating suffering, and transparent. These noble missions clash in everyday practice, so organizations that share the mantra also share predictable dilemmas. By gathering together studies of projects that share the mantra, and observing their typical efforts at resolving typical dilemmas, this article characterizes this newly prevalent organizational form: ‘The empowerment project’. When one dilemma pops up here, immediately, another pops up elsewhere.

Beyond participation: Strategies for deeper empowerment

2006

community action programmes and non-governmental sponsored projects..are surely projects that lead to greater autonomy and independence, factors vital for decolonisation. That these forms have existed separately from the enunciation of postcolonialism should not be forgotten (Goss 1996: 248)

Empowerment as Contested Terrain

European Societies, 2013

Sociological analysis has mainly portrayed empowerment as a manipulative masking discourse. However, various actors in society view it as the opposite of domination and espouse it as a goal. Empowerment can constitute a discursive field shaped by its internal contractions between autonomy and control, between ambition and risk of programmed failureexacerbated by the emphasis on responsibility, and between focus and stigmatization. The paper presents a case study of employability policy in the Netherlands. Employability can be seen as empowerment in matters of career. The study is based on 41 interviews with policy makers, managers, union and employers' leaders and politicians. It shows that actors drawing on the principle of empowerment as a goal in itself can reset or reclaim a drifting empowerment project in its inceptive phase and add their own twist during execution, evaluation and efforts to engineer improvements.

Empowerment Through Participation? Conceptual Explorations and A Case Study

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2003

In recent academic debates in urban and regional studies, however, questions of redistribution have to some extent been displaced by questions of recognition as part of a poststructuralist critique which claims that planning has been preoccupied`with the distribution of material resources'

Empowerment Beyond the Ordinary

There are some individuals in our communities whose potential cannot be fully fulfilled due to certain personal, social and financial factors. Consequently, such individuals inevitably lose social and personal identity, leading to their disempowerment. While total disempowerment is an elusive state, empowering those with low self-esteem is a convoluted process. This chapter reveals that among other things, it requires strategies for regaining the lost identity and a will power to fight all other negative barriers to empowerment. Above all others, as it will emerge from Peggy's experience; it takes determination and focus on the part of the disempowered individuals to make use of the availed and available opportunities for empowerment. This chapter reveals that such determination does not go without challenges. For instance, Peggy experienced both internal and external obstacles throughout her empowerment process.

Rethinking empowerment: Shared action against powerlessness

Psychology and society: Radical theory and …, 1996

Socially responsible psychologists are aware of the problem of power in the interconnected domains of psychological practice, knowledge, theory and ideology. Doing something worthwhile about the problem requires more than a description of the experience of powerlessness. We need to know something about how power relations are constructed and maintained (produced and reproduced) -knowing that we can identify points for intervention, and the characteristics of viable strategies. return to top