Empowerment and community salience in multi-party collaboration: empirical lessons for development planning

ABSTRACT

Despite the plethora of works on empowerment, questions remain regarding when and how empowerment impacts a community group’s salience in multi-party collaboration. This article uses an Australian context to examine the relationship between empowerment and salience in local development partnerships. In doing this, it uses bivariate, multinomial logistics and thematic analyses to build an empirical case that empowerment is one driver of change in salience status. Study findings show that stakeholder salience is significantly influenced by accountability and capacity building, which help to build meaningful development collaborations. The article concludes with critical development implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society – Participation, Partnership
• Oceania and Japan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Michael Odei Erdiaw-Kwasie is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Resilient Regions, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. His research focuses on sustainable development, resource economies, social programme evaluation, government policy evaluation, development planning, and digital futures.

Michael Yaw Acheampong is a development planner from the Planning Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and a member of the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana. His area of interest centres on tourism, local government issues, governance, and public policy. He currently chairs the Development Planning Sub-Committee of the Bosomtwe District Assembly in the Ashanti Region of the Republic of Ghana.