Foundations
What empowerment means, and why it matters now.
Empowerment is one of the most frequently used and least understood words in development vocabulary. It appears in policy documents, funding proposals, and political speeches so frequently that it’s gradually lost its meaning. This section, therefore, attempts to restore its meaning by grounding it in people’s experiences of institutional failure, research findings on the conditions under which people flourish, and the results of practical programmes that have provided the right catalyst.
Amartya Sen’s deceptively simple proposition provides the starting point: development is about advancing the richness of human life, not merely the economy. According to Sen, economic growth without investment in human capability is not only unsustainable, but also unethical. Poverty is not merely a lack of money. It’s the absence of the capability to realise one’s potential as a human being. This distinction is extremely important for how we design programmes, measure outcomes, and determine what constitutes success.
The second starting point is less comfortable. The World Bank’s ‘Voices of the Poor’ — drawing on the testimony of over 60,000 people living in poverty across forty countries — found that the state has largely been ineffective in reaching those who need it most. The failure isn’t s solely due to a shortage of resources or positive intentions on the part of governments, but rather to the fact that interactions between impoverished individuals and government officials are frequently characterised by discourtesy, humiliation, corruption, and a lack of concern. This is not a finding from the distant past. It describes a structural relationship between institutions and marginalised communities that’s persisted to the present day — in the Global South, but also in post-industrial communities across Europe and North America where a generation has grown up with little reason to trust the systems that are supposed to serve them.
The third theme running through this section is psychological. Diener and Biswas-Diener’s research on subjective well-being and empowerment shows that, while external conditions such as rights, resources, and access are necessary, they’re not sufficient. Empowerment also requires an internal conviction that one possesses the competence, energy, and ability to act. Positive emotions, a sense of dignity, and being taken seriously are not soft add-ons to development programmes; they’re preconditions for the programmes to work at all.
This section brings together three themes through concrete examples: a detailed account of community-driven water management in South Africa against the backdrop of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions; the transformation of military and industrial sites in post-Soviet transition economies; and the current work of organisations operating at the grassroots level in Italy and beyond, such as Kora and Primi Piani, which apply rights-based approaches to local democracy and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The thread connecting all of this work is the conviction, deepened by fieldwork across three continents, that communities, especially youth, possess the resources, knowledge, and will to shape their own lives. They do not require instructions, but rather the right catalyst and to be taken seriously when they act.
Source: Amartya Sen — Development as Freedom (1999) and related works
The Three Foundations
1. Amartya Sen: The Capability Approach
Sen’s framework shifts the question of development from ‘What does a society produce?’ to ‘What can people do and be?’ According to his capability approach, the relevant measure of human progress is not income or GDP, but the real freedoms people have to live lives they have reason to value.
Three propositions from his work underpin this section:
‘Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it.’
‘Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable — and unethical.’
‘Poverty is not merely a shortage of money; it’s the inability to fulfil one’s potential as a human being.’
These are not abstract principles. They’ve direct implications for how programmes are designed, how success is measured, and which definition of a good life is considered authoritative.
Source: Amartya Sen — Development as Freedom (1999) and related works
2. Voices of the Poor: What People Actually Experience
Between 1998 and 2000, the World Bank conducted the largest study of its kind, interviewing more than 60,000 people living in poverty in forty countries and asking them to describe their lives in their own words. The findings made for uncomfortable reading for development institutions.
While poor people recognised the government’s role in providing infrastructure, health, and education, they reported that official interventions had largely failed to improve their lives. Their interactions with the state all too often involved humiliation, harassment, corruption, and obstruction.
This is not a historical document. The structural dynamics it describes — such as the distance between institutions and the people they are supposed to serve, the erosion of trust, and the experience of being treated as a problem rather than a person — remain live realities in communities across the world, including Europe.
‘The Voices of the Poor’ provides an empirical basis for understanding why rights-based approaches to empowerment are not merely idealistic, but necessary.
Source: World Bank — Voices of the Poor (2000) — documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/131441468779067441/pdf/multi0page.pdf
3. Measuring Empowerment: The Psychological Dimension
In their concise brief, Diener and Biswas-Diener’s contribution to the cross-disciplinary literature on measuring empowerment highlights an issue that policy contexts often overlook: external conditions alone do not produce empowerment.
Even if legislation enshrines rights, allocates resources, and provides access, people can still feel incapable of acting. Psychological empowerment — the belief that one possesses the competence, energy, and ability to achieve important goals — constitutes a distinct and necessary component.
‘Psychological empowerment is one aspect of subjective well-being — the belief that one has the resources, energy, and competence to achieve important goals. Empowerment comprises both the ability to control one’s environment (external empowerment) and the belief that one can do so (internal empowerment).’
Their research shows that positive emotions are not only a consequence of empowerment, but also a prerequisite for it. They encourage sociability, self-confidence, flexible thinking, and active engagement with the environment.
The implications for programme design are clear. Dignity, being taken seriously, and accumulating small successes are central to empowerment. In many cases, they’re where it begins.
Source: Diener and Biswas-Diener — Psychological Empowerment and Subjective Well-Being, in Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (World Bank, 2005) — openknowledge.worldbank.org
Why This Matters Now
These three frameworks did not emerge from the same context, the same discipline, or the same moment in time. What connects them is the same structural diagnosis: that the gap between what development promises and what people experience is not primarily a gap of resources or intention. It is a gap of understanding — of what capability actually means, of what institutions actually do to the people who depend on them, and of what the internal conditions for agency and action actually require.
That gap is not closing. In many parts of Europe and the Global South it is widening. Younger generations feel the distance between the institutions of democracy and their own lives with an acuity that older frameworks of civic engagement were not designed to address. The erosion of the social infrastructure built in the post-war decades — public services, community anchors, frameworks of mutual obligation — has left many people without the experience of institutions that take their voices seriously.
At the same time, the international legislative architecture has never been more comprehensive. The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the EU’s legislative framework, the rights instruments to which virtually all governments are signatories — these create obligations that are real, enforceable, and largely unknown to the communities they are designed to protect.
The work described in this section — in South Africa, in post-Soviet transition economies, and in contemporary Italy — is the work of closing that gap. Not through top-down provision but through the patient, unglamorous, genuinely community-centred work of making rights real, capability visible, and agency possible.