Staff members and teams around the World Bank are engaged in a broad range of activities that seek to operationalize the concept of empowerment. In addition to in-country work, other teams including the Social Development Unit and the World Bank Institute’s Community Empowerment and Social Inclusion Team, are among those working on empowerment related topics. Information on this work can be found on the Community of Practice page, Related Links, and the Empowerment Library and Database. The work found below relates to the specific current initiatives of the Empowerment team which works in the poverty reduction and economic management anchor unit. Current work focuses on five areas: measuring empowerment, local governance, power and poverty, global coalitions of the poor, and country support. I. Measuring Empowerment In November 2002 The Empowerment Team, in collaboration with partners in five countries, launched the Measuring Empowerment Study, undertaking applied research on measuring and tracking empowerment. The country case studies, conducted in Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia and Nepal, developed and applied indicators for empowerment in a range of contexts. The Empowerment Team is presently working on the following outputs: 1. A Bank Technical Paper which draws together conceptual work on empowerment with the analytic framework and findings from the five case studies. The findings section will focus on (1) presenting indicative results of analysis on the link between empowerment goals and development outcomes; and (2) testing assumptions about the relationship between project interventions and empowerment goals. 2. A practical user guide on developing and applying instruments and indicators for measuring and evaluating empowerment. This will be made available in hard and electronic copy. 3. A case study-based learning module. This will be a stand alone product available in hard and electronic copy as well as available for on-line learning. 4. Working papers on a selection of the country case studies This work will be completed by June and final publications are expected by September. A policy research working paper (#3510) presenting an analytic framework and country indicators has recently been published. II. Local Governance Supporting on-going in country work on decentralization and governance, this component of our work program focuses on bringing together the supply side (typified by public sector reform) and the demand side (typified by Community Driven Development operations) of governance. Focusing on the interface of supply and demand the objective of this work is toenhance the effectiveness of the processes and mechanisms through which citizens and government engage. Working with local government -- both elected representatives and civil servants -- and citizens, we have developed an action learning approach to assist stakeholders examine experiences. This analysis, which includes consideration of the costs and benefits of engagement, is used to refine mechanisms and processes. In addition to generating information for immediate use by local stakeholders, cross site process monitoring draws out lessons for wider dissemination and as a contribution to policy discourse on decentralization. In addition, the team is also exploring the ways in which local public finances associate with empowerment. This analysis examines the fiscal determinants of empowerment, both in terms of local revenue generation and budget flexibility and assesses how the costs of participation and the local political economy affect the degree of empowerment experienced by citizens and local government. A research paper on this topic will be available shortly. III. Power and Poverty Building on the work undertaken under the measuring empowerment initiative this part of the work program has two components: 1. Indicators and Analysis work is underway in several countries to embed indicators and analysis of empowerment in national and project monitoring systems. Empowerment indicators allow governments, donors and civil society to track progress in empowerment and to improve policy and project interventions and to test the relationship between empowerment and poverty outcomes. 2. We are also coordinating case-study analysis of the association between imbalances in power relations and poverty outcomes. These case studies complement national and project level indicators by probing the historical and contemporary power dynamics that underpin unequal relations in political, economic and social spheres of life and which impact on poverty incidence, distributions and trends. IV. Country Support In addition to country support on the two main components of the empowerment team's work program, advisory inputs are provided to project design and monitoring and evaluation activities. Contributions are also made to World Bank country products, including Country Assistance Strategies, Poverty Assessments, Institutional Governance Reviews and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.
|
RSS