Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Description

The workshop on "Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives" brought together development practitioners and academics over two days to focus on conceptual and applied issues of measuring empowerment at the individual, household, community, and national levels. Each panel included presenters from a range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and political science. Sessions included:

Frameworks and Concepts

This session presented overall frameworks for measuring empowerment. It also explored one important concept, subjective well-being, and its relationship to more objective measures of income and expenditure.

Gender and Household

Economists, sociologists, and anthropologists have all used different modes of inquiry to address gender differentials and intra-household allocations of resources. The purpose of session was to explore measures of women's empowerment as well as intra-household dimensions of power.

Subjective Well-Being and Power

There were many different measures of well-being, the most common of which are economic, such as measures of income expenditure. Sociologists and psychologists have studied subjective measures. For example there is a vast literature on happiness and life satisfaction. This session explored the value of using subjective measures of well-being and how these link to objective measures of well-being and power.

Keynote Luncheon Speaker

Nicholas Stern, Senior Vice President & Chief Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

Community and Local Governance (two sessions)

The purpose of these sessions was to understand how empowerment can be measured at the community and local governance levels, as well as at the nexus of the two. This is especially important at the World Bank, as there is a large portfolio of community-driven development projects, as well as decentralization projects. As with other sessions, there was presenters from different disciplines using different methods.

National Level

Empowerment is particularly important at the local level, but affected by local level as well as national level policies. Some of the most important empowerment strategies can be affected by shifts in policies of national government. This session explored empowerment indicators at the national level, including links to democracy, strength of civil society, and the overall governance environment.

Reflections

This final session featured an interdisciplinary panel reflecting on workshop presentations and discussions, focusing on outcomes.

Workshop Background

The workshop follows upon the agreement reached on the empowerment framework documented in the Empowerment Sourcebook published by the World Bank earlier this year. The Sourcebook identifies empowerment as the expansion of assets and capabilities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives. More broadly stated, empowerment is about increasing people's choices and freedom of action and is important for its intrinsic value as well as its instrumental value in improving development effectiveness for poor people. The empowerment framework identifies four elements that seem to be critical across experiences: access to information; inclusion/participation; social accountability; and local organizational capacity. It further applies these elements to four critical development objectives: provision of basic services, improving local and national governance, access to markets and access to justice.

While the Sourcebook details a framework for empowerment, it does not examine in detail how empowerment can be measured. There are many definitions of empowerment and approaches to measuring empowerment. There are also many complexities including changes over time and context specificity of indicators of empowerment. As the World Bank moves into implementation of the empowerment framework, the issues around measurement become of great importance in projects, programs, and policy reform processes.

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