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This article provides information about the different dimensions in the process of empowering the marginalised group:
Empowerment is a political process. Before we going into conceptualising empowerment, it is necessary to develop an understanding of the following interrelated dimensions of this process:
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Dimensions of Legitimacy of Power:
The centrality of the notion of empowerment is located in the dynamics of sharing, distribution and redistribution of power, which has a basis of legitimacy.
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In the sociological sense of Max Weber, power is one’s capacity to have control over others; and as such, when this capacity to control is legitimised, it becomes authority. Indeed the logic of empowerment essentially involves the dynamics of authority. While one talks of the process of distribution/redistribution of
authority or in that sense legitimised power, one naturally questions not only the bases of legitimacy for the authority, but also the societal arrangements through which power relations are operated. Following the same logic, powerlessness has also been legitimised within the given social order. Hence empowerment will mean a process of distribution of power through legitimised means.
Context of Use:
While talking of authority (legitimised power) as the accompaniment of empowerment, James Herrick points out that authority in general is used in the following contexts: (a) regulatory, based on one’s formal position and status in relation to others; (b) expert knowledge, where the expert may possess the power to define ordinary people or to withhold knowledge from those whose well-being is affected by it; and (c) relationship ability or interpersonal skills, where power comes from interpersonal influence based on abilities to work with people.
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In human society, however, everybody has no equal authority as people have unequal access to the resources that determine power. Indeed, those who have power are those who have control over material resources, knowledge and ideology.
Hence the process of gaining control over self, ideology, material and knowledge resources, which determine power, may be termed empowerment. Thus the process of gaining control over resources is to be seen within the given context of devisal deprivation, structure of hierarchy and the process of legitimisation and reproduction. Indeed the process of empowerment endeavours to construct an alternative context for equal access to the resources that determine power.
Dynamics of Power Relations: The meaning of power in empowerment practice needs to be examined in terms of power relations. First, that there should be the ability to exercise power in a given context as having power is not the same as exercising it. Second, the exercise of power takes in the objective reality of empowerment – the structural conditions that affect the allocation of power; seizing or creating opportunities in the environment, changing structural conditions. Third, power relations can be symmetrical or asymmetrical.
Relations of symmetry are those where relatively equal amounts and type of power and authority are exercised and are based on reciprocity Relations of asymmetry are those involving unequal amount and types of authority and are those of subordination and super- ordination. It is the latter case – power relations of asymmetry, which we suggest is the major stage for empowerment practice.
Principle of Change and Transformation:
The process of empowerment challenges the power structures of subordination. In the words of Sen and Crown empowerment is concerned with the transformation of the structure of subordination. It implies a process of redistribution of power within and between families/societies (or systems) and a process aiming at social equality, which can be achieved only by disempowering some structures, systems and institutions. To Sharma it is having a specific focus for the disadvantaged sections. The processes of demolition of the pre-existing structure of subordination and redistribution of power, however, are not automatic.
These also involve participatory approaches that enable people to emancipate themselves, a process of the creation of new knowledge, a process of conscientisation and new identity formation with alternative sensibility. Indeed the process of empowerment is a social movement that looks for a radical change in the systemic arrangements of society.
Hence empowerment is viewed not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end — a strategy to bring liberation from all domination. Liberation from all domination, to Freire, is the fundamental theme of this epoch. This liberation is not a mechanical process but the critical thinking of the socio-historical reality of the life; ability to intervene in reality with a commitment is the harbingers of liberation. To quote Freire:
Men emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality, as it is unveiled. Intervention represents a step forward from emergence, and results from the conscientisation of the situation. Conscientisation is the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristics of all emergencies. By achieving awareness they come to perceive reality differently.
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In developing countries like India, development practices were geared towards “growth with stability”. In the fifties and early sixties with the basic thrust being for industrialisation, agricultural modernisation and expansion of infrastructure, education and mass communication. However, in the backdrop of imbalanced economic development, increased class inequality, gender segregation and sharp downward mobility of a vast section of the population along with increased levels of poverty, illiteracy and ill health, development policy was reoriented in India in the early seventies to incorporate the philosophy of “social justice” in the development discourse.
This reorientation of “development with justice” envisaged strategies to integrate the hitherto neglected “underprivileged”, “weaker sections”, “deprived and marginalised groups” into the mainstream of society by providing various state-sponsored economic (employment, access to productive resources, etc.) and social (education, training, healthcare, water, housing, etc.) benefits to them.
The development practice in India has been reoriented once again since the mid-eighties to associate the notion of empowerment with “development”. This reorientation aims at ensuring the basic necessities of life to the people “by sharing power” with them through institutionalised means, i.e., laws, legal procedures and international obligation. The significant point of departure here is that while the earlier discourses saw the poor people as “beneficiaries”, the emergent one has recognised them as “partners of development”.
Accordingly, there has been a new coinage of the term “social/human development” since the mid- eighties with the recognition that the “human person is the central subject of development”. The context of this reorientation, however, has been globalisation and the structural adjustment programme that implicitly or explicitly looks for the reduction of state expenditure in the social sector – health, education, food security and other basic needs — and the encouragement of privatisation. Thus the state has emerged as “central to economic and social development not as a direct provider of growth, but as a partner, catalyst and facilitator”.