ABSTRACT
‘Empowerment’ refers to a process by which people-as individuals, in groups and in organized communities-exercise an active and direct control over the factors influencing their life and their local environment. Is, in this sense, empowerment of local people a necessary condition for achieving a sustainable, equitable and liveable world? Exploring this question opens up an immense variety of issues, from populist theories in political sciences to comparative analysis of ecological impacts of different social systems, from models of communal formation to psychology of small groups, from economic analysis of historical phenomena (eg enclosure of the commons) to the current debate on development indicators. It would require the knowledge and experience of an anthropologist, an economic historian, a political scientist, a human ecologist, a demographer and a humorist to make a minimum of sense of the immense area opened up by that question. Even if I was all these people at once (and I am not even one of them), for every assertion I would have made I surely could find many excellent colleagues who disagreed. Therefore, this chapter will not provide a definite answer, but only offer some suggestive examples and general considerations on the matter.
