Empowerment and Community

Participation
PALASH KAMRUZZAMAN1 AND SARAH C. WHITE2
1 University of South Wales, United Kingdom
2 University of Bath, United Kingdom

The focus of this entry is a troubled relationship—that between empowerment and com-
munity participation. For many in international development these concepts form a
natural pair. In this view empowerment is the outcome of community participation,
or participation constitutes evidence of empowerment. For others, the relationship is
contested or even contradictory. They hold that participation may lead to empower-
ment but that it more typically signifies co-option or serves to mask coercion. A third
approach sees both participation and empowerment as traveling on similar trajectories
from the margins to the center of development. The optimistic reading considers that
this signals the progressive transformation of development to become more human-
istic and democratic. The more pessimistic version locates the change in the concepts
themselves, arguing that they shift from voicing a radical challenge to the development
orthodoxy to constituting a means of instrumental incorporation.
The relationship between empowerment and participation, then, is unavoidably
political. Different values affect how the terms are defined and how development itself
is understood. This entry assumes a default definition of development as the inten-
tional pursuit of social and economic change through the administrative apparatus of
projects, programs, and policies—what we might call the development industry. There
is an alternative view, that development constitutes the whole process of historical
change, but this would seem to take too broad a canvas. Within the industry and the
penumbra of scholarship that surrounds it, a common trope contrasts more technical
with more political approaches, and this is often deployed in discussions of empow-
erment and participation. In fact, of course, the choice to construct development in
technical terms is itself political.
The entry begins with brief introductions to the two key terms, “empowerment” and
“participation,” their history, and some main areas of debate. It then addresses their rela-
tionship: first, through typologies that seek to identify forms of participation that are
and are not empowering and, second, through reviewing a series of critiques. This the-
oretical discussion is then grounded in a brief review of some examples of participation
in development practice, leading to a final reflection.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2062
2 E M P O WE R M E N T A ND C O M M U N I T Y P A R T I CI PAT I O N

Empowerment

The roots of empowerment lie in “conscientization,” the process advanced through the
civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in which women and people of color
came together to reflect that what they had taken to be individual problems were in fact
collective issues, that stigmatized identities could be reinhabited as sources of pride
(“black is beautiful”) and to work together for the social and political dismantlement of
structural injustice. In Africa, particularly, decolonization brought recognition of the
need not only for new models of development but also for liberated ways of thinking.
The Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s (1970) work on the “pedagogy of the oppressed”
inspired community organizers all over the world to encourage marginalized people to
dismantle dominated habits of thought and to mobilize collectively for change.
The origins of empowerment are thus explicitly political and challenging to the status
quo. Intrinsic to the concept is a fusion of thought and action, political and personal,
individual and structural change. Beginning with social movements, empowerment
then came to be adopted by community and nongovernmental organizations. This
entailed a shift in emphasis, from people empowering themselves together to some
seeking to facilitate the empowerment of others. A key area of debate arose as to
whether empowerment was a zero-sum game, with some having to lose power if others
gained it. Mayo and Craig (1995) sought to expand on Talcott Parsons’s view of power
and suggested that power resides with members of a society as a whole. This would
mean that the total sum of power can increase with the successful pursuit of individual
and collective goals, and so empowerment of the powerless could be achieved within
the existing social order without any significant negative effects upon the powerful.
Some feminist work distinguished power over others from power within oneself or
power to realize one’s own potential, and pointed out that power may be positive
and enabling, such as the power of creativity or the ability to resolve conflicts. Others
argued that real empowerment for women at a structural level could nonetheless be
achieved only if there were some loss of power by men.
With the growth of gender awareness in development in the 1970s and particularly
the 1980s, empowerment came increasingly to be identified with women. As recogni-
tion of gender became more mainstream, so understandings of empowerment shifted
to become more in line with the political and economic liberalism of the dominant
development agencies (Batliwala 2007). The collective became more individualized, the
political and social more economic, the process of empowerment not an end in itself
but the means to other ends. Alsop and Heinsohn (2005, 4) provide an example of this,
as they identify empowerment as “the existence of choice, the use of choice, and the
achievement of choice.” They also report the shift to a more instrumental approach
in the World Bank’s designation of (women’s) empowerment as an important means
to poverty reduction to the World Development Report for 2000. While more radical
approaches persist and new forms continually emerge, the twenty-first century has thus
seen the language of empowerment increasingly incorporated within dominant dis-
courses.
 E M P O WE R M E N T A ND C O M M U N I T Y P A R T I CI PAT I O N 3

Participation

When empowerment and participation are so frequently mixed up together, it is worth

taking a moment to reflect on how different they are. Whether empowerment is seen
as a process or an outcome, as collective or individual, the focus is on people and the
real difference achieved for them. By contrast, participation simply denotes engagement
with an institution, movement, or event: the focus is on the action, not the actor.
That having been said, action is imbued with meaning. Participation can be seen to
confer legitimacy, signal commitment, enhance a sense of ownership, and provide a
share in power. It is generally seen as good. The case for participation may be made on
moral grounds, as in children’s right to participate in decisions that affect them (Article
12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989). It may also
be made instrumentally, on the basis that local people (or women or children) know
their own situation best and so are best qualified to devise strategies to improve it, or to
ensure “buy in,” to make interventions sustainable after funding is withdrawn. Implicit
within the notion of participation is the sense that it should be appropriate, that is, take
approved forms. Local initiatives such as cutting canal embankments to divert water
for irrigation, siphoning off oil from multinational pipelines, or making illicit electricity
connections to power poor neighborhoods, do not count as participatory development.
“Participation” thus means participating in the right way and may be used to defuse
opposition or to counter “illegitimate” forms of engagement.
Robert Chambers has been a major figure in promoting participation in international
development. This grew out of his frustration with the cumbersome paraphernalia
of formal development research which failed to recognize the extensive knowledge
of local people and instead reflected a number of institutional biases and reproduced
a set of prejudices and forms of ignorance about the poor (Chambers 1983). For
Chambers, then, participation has always been about power and about knowledge. A
prominent dimension of his work has involved the encouragement of participatory
research methods as a means for people in situations of disadvantage to become
coproducers of knowledge about their situation. He also sees indigenous knowledge
as the basis for people’s self-management of development projects. From the start,
however, Chambers has emphasized that changes need to be made by those “above” as
well as “below,” in the behavior, attitudes, and methods of development practitioners,
and institutional shifts to a culture of sharing, respect for people’s knowledge, and
partnership (Chambers 1997).
Another major issue is the question of who participates. Communities are notori-
ously unequal, highly stratified by age and gender and often also by wealth, race, eth-
nicity, religion, or caste. This is usually addressed by structuring participatory events
so that like sits with like, with separate meetings for women and men, for example.
There is, however, an obvious trade-off between local ownership and egalitarian par-
ticipation. How far is it legitimate for outsiders to intervene to promote the partici-
pation of those who are “traditionally” silenced? And the more marginalized a group
is, the more investment needs to be made to support their participation. Participa-
tory work with children, for example, tends to select relatively empowered middle-class
or elite young people who can “naturally” speak confidently in national policy fora
4 E M P O WE R M E N T A ND C O M M U N I T Y P A R T I CI PAT I O N

(White and Choudhury 2007). If less advantaged children are selected, they need more
intensive coaching to participate effectively. This changes the “voice” with which they
speak, and can alienate them from the community that they supposedly represent. The
need to understand the rules of the game in development consultations means that,
whether middle or working class, the demands for “child participation” from the global
development community can result in a semiprofessional small group of select children
who attend multiple events.

Typologies of participation and empowerment

A number of writers have used typologies to chart the relationship between partici-
pation and empowerment. An early example is Arnstein’s (1969) advocacy of genuine
participation as a means of citizen power, in which the “have-nots” can influence key
decisions and so begin to share the benefits of affluent society. However, she labels the
lower rungs on her “ladder of participation” “manipulation” and “therapy” (Figure 1).
These enable power holders to “educate” or “cure” the participants, which she classi-
fies as “nonparticipation.” The next rungs of “informing” and “consultation” constitute
token participation because participants’ views might be heard but may not be heeded.
“Placation” is a higher level of tokenism as participants may be able to advise but the
power holders retain control. “Partnership” enables participants to negotiate and engage
with power holders and, at the top, “delegated power” and “citizen control” enable dis-
advantaged citizens to gain real power over decision making.
A later typology of participation is provided by White (1996). Instead of simply
identifying a linear relationship where more is better, this draws attention to the
different forms and functions of participation and how interests in these may differ
from “top-down” and “bottom-up” perspectives (Table 1). Rather than assuming, as
the majority of typologies do, that excluded people always have an interest in the fullest
form of participation, White recognizes that they may be happy to settle for nominal
participation with the function of “display,” which provides for their inclusion. White
also explicitly recognizes the potentially negative side of participation; for example,
having to help build a community school may constitute a cost rather than a benefit
for local people. Participation often happens for negative reasons—people do not have
confidence that their interests will be represented unless they are physically present.
Withdrawal from participation may not be a positive choice; it may, for example,
indicate excessive burdens elsewhere. There should nonetheless be scope to choose
not to participate. Over time, as White (1996) remarks, one can grow tired of being an
“active citizen.”
Cornwall (2000) sets the focus slightly differently as three stages. In the first, devel-
opment is done for people who are required to participate by making contributions. The
second sees participation as a process owned and controlled by those whom develop-
ment is supposed to benefit, for example, involving broader struggles for democracy and
equity. The third involves a closer relationship between those who work in development
and those who are intended to benefit from it—working with people, rather than on or
for them.
 E M P O WE R M E N T A ND C O M M U N I T Y P A R T I CI PAT I O N 5

Citizen control
8
Degrees
Delegated power of
citizen power
7

Partnership

Placation

5
Degrees
Consultation of
tokenism
4

Informing
3

Therapy
2
Nonparticipation

Manipulation
1

Figure 1 The ladder of participation.

Source: Data from Arnstein 1969.

Table 1 Interests in participation.

Form Top-Down Bottom-Up Function

Nominal Legitimation Inclusion Display
Instrumental Efficiency Cost Means
Representative Sustainability Leverage Voice
Transformative Empowerment Empowerment Means-end
Source: White 1996, 144.

White (1996) draws attention to a further aspect of participation that typologies can
tend to overlook—that it is dynamic and its form and function often change over time.
In terms of Table 1, this means that the “same” example of participation may move
between the different levels rather than being fixed at one. When an assessment is made
may thus have a critical effect on whether participation is judged to be empowering
or not. The relative absence of attention to the question of time in the literature on
participation in development is quite remarkable, since the difficulty of sustaining par-
ticipation is perhaps the dominant experience in social initiatives. There might be a
6 E M P O WE R M E N T A ND C O M M U N I T Y P A R T I CI PAT I O N

number of reasons for this. “Dropout” may be hidden because new recruits take the
place of those who leave. Alternatively, forms of participation in international develop-
ment may not be as free as they might first appear, meaning that people persist with
them longer than they might otherwise choose to, perhaps in the hope of gaining some
benefit or from fear of losing one. Finally, the lack of attention to fluctuations over time
might suggest the artificiality of the kinds of participation involved in international
development and their status as forms of performance.

Critiques of participation

While the typologies recognize that participation is by no means necessarily empower-

ing, other writings argue the need for a much more fundamental critique, rejecting the
patronizing style and assumed benevolence in claims of seeking to empower the other.
Laclau and Mouffe (1985) criticize the very limited scale of change envisaged in most
works on participation and argue that a real challenge to hegemonic interests in the
state and the market would require a structural transformation of economic and politi-
cal relations toward a radically democratized society. Alongside the question about the
form of participation is the issue of what kind of project is being participated in. Is the
current form of participation simply legitimating the established order or does it carry
within it the seed of more radical change?
Cooke and Kothari (2001) launch a major critique of participation, which they
describe as a “new tyranny.” They argue that participatory facilitators override existing
legitimate decision-making processes and provide a thin veil for the enduring control
of multilateral agencies and funders; that group dynamics mean that participatory
decisions reinforce the interests of the already powerful; and that participatory research
methods have driven out other, particularly qualitative, approaches which may provide
deeper insights and more provocative questions. Hickey and Mohan (2004) counter
this by arguing that participation has actually deepened and extended its role, opening
up new debates, spaces, and opportunities, including much more scope for everyday
citizens to provide comments and opinions to governments, donors, and other institu-
tions. Cornwall (2008) states that it is important not to neglect the many examples that
can be found where people have participated in movements that have enabled them
to secure rights, resources, and recognition. In her view, these forms of autonomous
participation are as much part of development as invited participation and need to be
considered as part of what “participation” means.

Participation in practice

The limitations of trying to graft participation onto an inherently hierarchical process

are illustrated by the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Introduced by the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the idea was to engender a
bottom-up process of development policy formulation to be prepared by the national
government with the participation of all major stakeholders. In practice, however,
 E M P O WE R M E N T A ND C O M M U N I T Y P A R T I CI PAT I O N 7

Cornwall (2008) argues that the PRSPs’ high rhetoric simply involved people in making
marginal choices while the real decisions were being made elsewhere. Kamruzzaman
(2009, 2014) argues that in Bangladesh the PRSP was used to validate and authenticate
an external framework that was designed to tighten the hegemonic control of the
international financial institutions over poor countries. Participation attempted to
add a flavor of local ownership, but in reality local people had very little input in the
production of the PRSP. Consultation meetings at the divisional level were carefully
orchestrated by the people from the National Poverty Focal Point in the capital
city, and they in turn had to follow the guidelines of the World Bank and the IMF.
Participation was required to meet donor conditions for continuing national aid/debt
relationships. This, however, sat uneasily with the absence of any supportive and
established mechanism in Bangladesh through which citizens could participate within
the structure and institutions of the state.
The Bangladesh case is not an isolated one. In most countries the contents of the
PRSPs reflect the dominance of international financial institutions’ policy prescriptions
instead of the priorities of the poor. The scope for “participation” was highly struc-
tured though multiple guidelines and the international financial institutions wielded
inordinate power through their authority over approval or rejection. The result was a
remarkably consistent set of policies, despite considerable differences in the histories
and current circumstances of the countries to which they referred. Not only are they
similar to one another, but the general thrust of the macroeconomic policies put for-
ward is highly reminiscent of the standard structural adjustment programs of the past.
The IMF’s own Independent Evaluation Office itself found that “results in terms of own-
ership are mixed with only a narrow circle of officials developing any real ownership of
the process” (IEO of IMF 2004, 3).
The framing of participation in ways that disempower is also shown by Hart (2007) in
the very different context of young Palestinians. Hart describes how participatory events
between Israeli and Palestinian young people are set up as “nonpolitical,” with the result
that much of the life experience of the Palestinians is effectively ruled off-limits. Rein-
forcing the point made earlier about participation being recognized only if it takes
“proper” and “appropriate” forms, Hart (2008) draws attention to policy depictions of
the involvement of displaced young people in the Middle East in military-type activ-
ities or political violence. Rather than being seen as chosen, authentic actions, these
are either put down to individual moral or intellectual shortcomings or to trickery or
coercion by adults. This avoids engaging with young people’s experiences and political
views, including their interpretations of “donor” governments’ foreign policies and how
these may motivate them into particular forms of action.
Scott-Villiers (2011) gives a striking example of how unexpected participation can
upset the assumptions of development professionals. The fact that this is so unusual
itself draws attention to how much participation is scripted, whether consciously or
unconsciously. The setting was a Nairobi hotel and a conference about pastoralist
communities in the Horn of Africa region. Experts were observing that the situation
was “desperate” for pastoralist communities and becoming worse, with general agree-
ment that a crisis was imminent. But then one of the four elders from the pastoralist
community rose to his feet and declared “We are not poor!” He went on to describe
8 E M P O WE R M E N T A ND C O M M U N I T Y P A R T I CI PAT I O N

the wealth of their lands for grazing and the animals they kept. He also rejected the
idea that his people were ignorant, pointing out that their in-depth knowledge of the
local environment was what enabled the community to survive. When he sat down
the room was in uproar. The old man was dismissed as representing the elite and the
dominant discourse of shortage and backwardness was reasserted. Over the next few
days, however, the mood of the meeting shifted a bit, and some accommodation to the
elder’s views was made. But, a few months later, when the draft policy document was
prepared, the deficit discourse was back.

Reflection: Participation, empowerment, and development

The beginning of this entry noted two views of development, as the “industry” that
aims to promote social, economic, and political change or, more broadly, the processes
of historical change themselves. Taking the narrower definition, as has been done in this
entry, draws attention to three points. The first is that this is the home territory of partic-
ipation but not necessarily of empowerment. It makes sense to talk about broadening
and deepening levels of participation in projects, programs, and policies. At a mini-
mum, these entities need participation to function. They also need it to demonstrate
legitimacy. Projects, programs, and policies need a population. If people are involved,
then it is important that they are treated in ways that respect their knowledge and dig-
nity and that provide them with opportunities to grow, develop, have fun, and exercise
agency, should they wish to do so. It is also important that they can withdraw whenever
they want to and that they are asked to commit time and resources only to the level at
which they feel comfortable. This might be termed “responsible participation.”
Empowerment is an altogether different concept, and it is not clear that administra-
tive structures are its natural home. It can, of course, be domesticated, cut down to fit,
so that “economic empowerment” simply means earning a higher income. The danger
then—as in this case—is that the term signifies just an inflation of claims where more
modest, more precise descriptors of what change had been achieved would be more
appropriate. The fusion of personal and political, individual and collective, thought and
action which empowerment promises seems something altogether bigger, something
that belongs out on the road and in the forest, out among people organizing themselves
at the campfire or the picket lines, not in the office or on the Gantt chart.
The second point that identifying development with the administrative apparatus of
policies, programs, and projects makes clear is that there are boundaries around what
it can achieve. Some of the visions of empowerment are utopian, envisioning revo-
lutionary structural change, the overthrow of the world capitalist system. This is not
something that will ever be achieved through administrative means. Participation in
such a system is bound to be constrained. Empowerment, if it happens at all, will be
incremental, a matter of staking out new territory, not of systemic overthrow. It might
be good to face this with greater humility and honesty.
The third point, however, suggests why such honesty is difficult to achieve. Devel-
opment may, indeed, be a matter of administration and bureaucracy but it also has
 E M P O WE R M E N T A ND C O M M U N I T Y P A R T I CI PAT I O N 9

something to sell. Participation constitutes a key part of this because the development
industry needs to sell its wares to the public, to enlist the public in its programs and
plans, and part of what it sells is a democratic idea of development itself. But, more
than this, what the development industry has to sell is the future, a vision of a world
free from hunger and fear. In seeking to sell that future, it will always overclaim. It
will always have the tendency to speak of economic empowerment when it really
refers to some petty trading. And, in rallying people to that vision, it will always seek
to control them and to use them for its own ends. In international development,
discourses of both participation and empowerment are susceptible to co-option
and the neutralization of radical alternatives. But they also indicate the lofty vision
of how development imagines itself, which for both critics and advocates is rather
more extensive and powerful than what it is really within the industry’s capacity to
achieve.

SEE ALSO: Capability Approach; Charity and Philanthropy; Community-Based

Ethnography; Cultural Politics; Development Agencies; Development and Forced
Displacement; Discourse; Display, Anthropological Approaches to; Educational Issues
in Development; Energy Issues in Development; Intellectual Property; Interculturality;
International Development, Anthropology in; Nongovernmental Organizations and
Civil Society in Development; Participatory Development; Policy, Anthropology and;
Political Anthropology; Positive Deviance; Power, Anthropological Approaches to;
Sex/Gender Distinction; Technology and Development; Theater, Anthropology and;
Urbanism

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