ABSTRACT
What do we mean by “empowerment?” The term is widely used by a variety of individuals and institutions across the whole range of the political and ideological spectrum. More or less everyone is in favor of “the empowerment of the people,” but we have different views about what exactly that means and how to bring it about. In the 1980s and early 1990s the dominant view in many parts of the world saw markets as the instruments of empowerment of individuals and states as the instruments of their disempowerment. The three papers in this section show how limited that view is when we are considering the empowerment of women. Agarwal's chapter offers a formal definition of empowerment, as follows:
a process that enhances the ability of disadvantaged (“powerless”) individuals or groups to challenge and change (in their favor) existing power relationships that place them in subordinate economic, social and political positions.
Women's empowerment is distinguished by Agarwal from women's welfare (which is discussed in terms of poverty alleviation), and this seems appropriate, for women's welfare can be improved in ways that do not change the existing power relations and leave women still in positions of dependency. Agarwal also distinguishes empowerment, as a process, from gender equality, as an outcome, and discusses the kinds of activities, including individual resistance as well as group mobilization, which might constitute this process. Implicit in her definition is the idea that empowerment of women is about changing the parameters within which individual women live their lives.