Discussions about power and rights are increasingly taking place in international development agencies, but the activity of those organisations does not reflect this. This report brings together background materials and discussions from a working meeting between the World Bank and DFID that focussed on understanding the conceptual underpinnings and relationships among power, rights and poverty reduction.
Empowerment is a complex process of raising individual and collective consciousness and increasing the capacity of individuals and groups to make choices that can be transformed into desired actions and outcomes. Imbalances in power relations affect people’s capacity to make effective choices and benefit from poverty reduction efforts. This has direct relevance to rights-based approaches to development – based on justice and equity in relations between people and state responsibility to advance, promote and protect the entitlements of individuals.
The centrality of power and rights is rarely explicitly recognised in the World Bank’s lending and analytic work that stresses its economic mission. There are numerous ways in which power and rights can be conceptualised, understood and translated into action.
- Our perceptions of power are influenced by our positions and experiences and a single conceptual understanding of power cannot be sought.
- Those of us with our roots in the Western democratic tradition may have views on the route to pro-poor change that may not align with local perceptions and interests in changing power relations.
- Successful poverty reduction depends on providing opportunities for poor people to contest their rights through normative changes and enabling poor people to enhance their capabilities and mobilise.
- Rights-based approaches suggest a switch from a technical to a political understanding of development based on the premises that people have rights, governments have obligations and people’s participation is central.
- Without power, as enshrined in formal institutions and backed by adequate human capabilities, poor people cannot successfully contest their rights.
- Effectively changing power relations and empowering poor people involves influencing political structures and processes to change the relative position of the poor.
Changing power relations and supporting the realisation of human rights essentially means promoting social change.
- By introducing notions of power into project implementation, donors can help empowerment become a mainstream component of development work.
- Donors should avoid the simplistic belief that externally invoked interventions can sustainably change power relations and focus on enhancing deeply rooted structural change in both pre- and post-project implementation institutions.
- Pro-poor reform initiatives will have broader and deeper institutional impacts if they are accompanied by interaction between policymakers and civil society.
- Not only do donors need to be better equipped with indicators and instruments for tracking empowerment at the national and intervention level, there is also an immediate need to generate research exploring the association between power relations and poverty.
- Donors need an informed understanding of the local realities of social and political change as their engagement can undermine as easily as reinforce the capacity of poor people to challenge patterns of power relations that lead to their exclusion.
- Donors must not only work to enhance the capabilities of the disempowered and disenfranchised, but also ensure that an enabling environment is conducive to equalising opportunity for all.
