What does Legal Empowerment of the Poor (LEP) mean? How can it be achieved and assessed? This paper outlines LEP’s components – the enhancement, awareness, enablement and enforcement of rights. Synergies could be realised if projects pursued components simultaneously. It is difficult to address legal empowerment issues at the appropriate level: an intervention might fail because it is too superficial, or because it is too ambitious and is blocked by vested interests. However, some LEP interventions can be combined in ways that avoid losing important but risky opportunities. Indicators for assessing LEP could be divided into those which reflect efforts to deliver LEP, and those which measure its realisation.
Legal empowerment of the poor ‘occurs when the poor, their supporters, or governments – employing legal and other means – create rights, capacities, and/or opportunities for the poor that give them new power to use law and legal tools to escape poverty and marginalization’. As a nation’s body of law contains rules that provide all people with undifferentiated opportunities to improve their livelihoods, LEP holds potential for the poor. However, the extent of access to the law and the institutions that uphold and enforce it often depends on one’s wealth, education, access to information and inclusion in social networks.
LEP is often used with little understanding of what it encompasses. It involves:
- Rights enhancement: Ensuring that the poor are able to influence the development of policy and law and to enhance their rights through democratic and transparent political processes.
- Rights awareness: Ensuring that the poor understand their rights and the processes by which they can be exercised and enforced.
- Rights enablement: Ensuring that the poor are able to overcome bureaucratic and cost barriers to economic opportunity and wealth generation.
- Rights enforcement: Ensuring access to affordable, fair mechanisms for the enforcement of rights and contracts and for dispute resolution.
Interventions to legally empower the poor can be divided into those that: (1) involve major constitutional or legislative change; (2) involve major institutional change (which will usually require major legal change); (3) only require changes in regulations or ministerial instructions or that can be accomplished within the agency concerned; and (4) can be undertaken without legal change or through contractual means. Most major legal reforms require considerable work from officials, politicians, and others to achieve real change on the ground. These potential costs should be assessed early on, and legal reforms should only be pursued if implementation funding is available. Regulations and instructions or contractual forms can be more easily changed (by the relevant ministry). Reform advocates should therefore ask if their objectives can be achieved in this way before resorting to major law reforms.
Each component might be thought of as a bundle of issues represented by a set of indicators. Comparative country assessments that are made publicly available can help to increase political will for reform. Perhaps the most valid basis for comparing LEP across countries is in comparing individual countries’ progress toward LEP – that is, the degree and rate of change in key indicators.
Moving from identifying the conceptual elements of LEP and potential indicators to establishing a minimal but robust indicator set requires a careful weighing of LEP’s benefits and challenges. It also implies mapping out steps that would lead to its realisation: conceptual work; an LEP assessment approach and assessment tool; assessments that draw on poor people’s experience of LEP deprivation; surveys; and longitudinal studies and expert evaluation.
