Empowerment, voice and accountability

“Empowerment” has become a commonly used term within international development discourses and is often seen within donor and government project, programme and policy documents. A decade ago the 2000/01 World Development Report recognised that empowering poor people – by making state and social institutions more responsive to them – is key to reducing poverty. More recently, empowerment has been increasingly recognised as a development objective in its own right and not just as a means to an end. But as with many other terms, it is often understood in multiple ways and this complicates its usage, with the danger that its use in development policy becomes more rhetorical than meaningful.

Integrating the concept into poverty analysis is hindered by difficulties in measuring and monitoring progress towards empowerment. In order to “operationalise” the concept and ensure its usefulness, it is necessary to define it in a particular way. Given the increasing emphasis currently being placed on measuring and demonstrating impact of development interventions and policies, it has then become important to think about how empowerment can subsequently be tracked or “measured”. Whether this can be done in a meaningful way is perhaps subject to debate. Poverty has usually been measured through an income- or consumption-based approach that measures material outcomes. However, an approach to measuring empowerment has to capture processes and relational changes that are less predictable, less tangible, more contextual and more difficult to quantify in data collection and analysis. This raises challenges relating to issues of meaning, causality and comparability.

Unsurprisingly, given these challenges, there have been relatively few practical attempts to assess whether policy interventions are actually having an empowering effect, even when this is an explicit policy objective. Despite these difficulties, OPM has worked with the World Bank to develop and operationalise an analytical framework to monitor and measure empowerment. The framework was based on a definition of empowerment which centred around the capacity to make choices and transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes, with this capacity being determined by an iterative relationship between asset-based “agency” and “opportunity structure” (the institutional context within which people live).

Policies and interventions which aim to empower people also address the capacity of citizens to reinforce change by demanding better governance and holding officials to account. Empowerment as a means (if not an end in itself) is implicit in initiatives to increase accountability. Support to increase accountability has often focussed on the state itself – the “supply” side. However, more recent emphasis has been both on strengthening citizen “voice” (or the “demand” side – i.e. the capacity of and opportunity for citizens, including the poor and traditionally marginalised, to directly participate in policy-making processes) as well as on strengthening accountability mechanisms that enable the state to respond to these demands. OPM’s research and experience in understanding accountability processes between government officials, state institutions and citizens and the socioeconomic and political context within which these operate enables us to support the design and implementation of practical and improved accountability mechanisms which address both the demand and supply sides of the relationship. We have also undertaken evaluations of development aid for strengthening Citizens’ Voice and Accountability (CV&A), for instance in Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a multi-country evaluation of CV&A for the Evaluation Core group of seven donor partners.