Empowerment, agency, and power

Abstract

As ‘empowerment’ and ‘agency’ have received wider usage within development research and policy, ambiguities and variant meanings have proliferated. Amidst this conceptual drift, there has also been a tendency to assimilate the two concepts. This tendency is problematic in a number of ways. First, ‘agency’ has various meanings, and the weakest of these captures little of the concept of empowerment. Second, empowerment has a conceptual link with well-being that agency cannot have. Third, when empowerment is assimilated with expanded agency, that agency is not considered in a relational way: the focus is on how the agency of a group or individual becomes greater than it was, not on the degree to which their agency is dependent on or dominated by the agency of others. If ‘empowerment’ no longer refers to social relations, it loses its direct relevance to the transformation of those relations and, as some critics have claimed, it ceases to be a ‘transformative’ concept. After showing that there are cases of empowerment that cannot be captured by conceptions of empowerment that ‘take power out’, I draw upon the capability approach to propose relational conceptions of agency and empowerment that ‘bring power back in’.

Keywords:

• agency
• empowerment
• development
• power

Acknowledgements

I learned much from discussion of an earlier version of this article, ‘How to Distinguish Empowerment from Agency’, at the 2008 Conference of the Human Development and Capabilities Association in New Delhi and from comments by Desmond McNeill on a previous article, ‘Durable Empowerment’. I am grateful for continuing conversations that I have had with Christine Koggel and, most recently, for editorial suggestions by Eric Palmer.

Notes on contributor

Jay Drydyk is Professor of Philosophy at Carleton University in Canada. He is a Fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association and Past President of the International Development Ethics Association. He is co-author of Displacement by Development: Ethics, Rights, and Responsibilities (Cambridge, 2011) as well as articles on ethics and development, the capabilities approach, social and global justice, human rights, and global ethics.

Notes

1. Some usages are mystifying, such as: ‘Since the process of human development often involves great struggle, the empowerment involved in the language of claims can be of great practical importance’ (UNDP 2000, 22).

2. What I am saying here is that, according to the capability approach, things and events are advantageous to a person because of the role they play in activities arising from that person's autonomous agency. The capability approach also holds that things and events are advantageous to a person because of their contribution to that person's well-being freedom. For example, health care is advantageous because it enhances our capability to live a longer and healthier life. Although it acknowledges both as evaluative spaces, the capability approach insists that the second is superior for purposes of social policy in revealing the inequalities that matter most.

3. For a good survey of this complex literature, see Allen (2011).

4. Notice that this asymmetry might not hold in a case of domestic assault if the assailant can threaten retaliation for calling in protection.

5. I readily admit that ‘subjection’ and ‘dominance’ sound harsh as applied to children. But the fact is children are subject to choices of their parents, who are also dominant in family decisions, even when these relations are loosened over time to provide for the children's growth and the expansion of their agency.