Empowerment and the Role of Advocacy in a Globalized World

Abstract

To understand empowerment, I argue, we need to situate it in a context of the growing impact of economic globalization on groups, communities, countries, and the people in them. I begin by using feminist and postcolonial insights on relations of power at local and global levels to sketch the central concepts of empowerment, advocacy, and globalization. I then use these insights to examine the World Bank's recent work on empowerment. While the World Bank is alert to the complexity of empowerment processes, it ignores the ways in which the local is increasingly being reshaped by features of economic globalization. This lack can be explained by the World Bank's role in the global context, one that assumes that economic globalization can alleviate the disempowerment of “poor people in poor countries”. This position undercuts its claims to advocate for the poor. Its role as advocate is problematic because it fails to attend to relationships at the global level, including relationships it develops with poor people and Third World countries. To give substance to this critique, I discuss work being done by SATUNAMA, a non-profit, non-political organization that advocates for and works to empower people in different regions and sectors of Indonesia.

Keywords:

• Development Ethics
• Empowerment
• Advocacy
• Feminism
• Postcolonial Theory
• Globalization
• Power
• Relational Theory
• Non-governmental Organizations

I am enormously greateful to Jan Newberry, an antropologist and friend who guided me through Indonesia, and to the people at SATUNAMA, who were such generous hosts and teachers in the midst of dealing with the earthquake in central Java. I would also like to thank Jay Drydyk, principal investigator of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grant “The Ethics of Empowerment” as well as Andrew Brook, Lorraine Code, Cynthia Bisman, Derek Clifford and the anonymous reviewers for Ethics & Social Welfare.

Notes

¹I need to qualify this claim about SATUNAMA's role in Indonesia by saying that not all local NGOs can play this positive role of advocating for and empowering people in their communities and countries. Some argue that the strength of the NGO sector in Indonesia emerges from its history in a way that has expanded its role as a broker between the local and the regional and the regional and the national (Hikam 1999).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine M. Koggel

Christine M. Koggel is Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, USA