Make it Practical #1: Srilatha Batliwala’s “Taking the power out of empowerment” (2007)

How the term 'empowerment' became a fluffy buzzword, despite its radical roots.

Welcome to the first edition of my new series, Make it Practical! This is my attempt to review academic articles about gender, international development, and philanthropy to make them a little more useful for those of us who work in these sectors. Skip to the bottom for updates about Cynara’s new Gender Training Platform. (If this was forwarded to you, subscribe now to receive this series directly in your inbox.)

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“Taking the power out of empowerment: an experiential account” by Srilatha Batliwala

In this 2007 article, Indian advocate and scholar Srilatha Batliwala explains how, in her experience, the word, concept, and approach of women’s empowerment evolved during the period around 1970s-1990s.¹ Batliwala illustrates how language of empowerment rose into prominence from a radical tradition led by South Asian feminists and was quickly co-opted by governments, international development agencies, and INGOs.

When did this happen?

Batliwala explains how the term empowerment was revitalized in the 1970s (or so), influenced by liberation theology, popular education, Black power, and other feminist and social movements of the time. Through the language of empowerment, feminists offered a “hitherto absent gender dimension” into Paulo Freire’s ‘conscientisation’ approach (e.g., becoming aware of one’s own oppression) and Antonio Gramsci’s “subaltern” theory (e.g., domination and hierarchies of power.) By merging feminism with these theories, empowerment was about transformation of not only patriarchy, but also other “mediating structures of class, race, ethnicity – and, in India, caste and religion” (558).

In the international development sector, feminist movements in India (and elsewhere) put forward empowerment as an alternative to the top-down models referred to at the time as Women in Development and Gender and Development.

How did they define empowerment?

Batliwala spends a lot of time on the different ways advocates defined empowerment. But, she emphasized that, “the most important point” across feminist groups’ various definitions is that empowerment:

“was a socio-political process, that the critical operating concept within empowerment was power, and that empowerment was about shifts in political, social, and economic power between and across both individuals and social groups” (559).

I interpret three particularly relevant elements of this definition:

• Empowerment is not just a social or economic process – it is political too

• It is literally about shifting power

• It is about shifting power not just for individuals, but between and across groups

What went wrong?

Alas, empowerment was a catchy word. By the 1990s, governments and development agencies were jumping to use it. But they only vaguely defined it, hijacking the term (or allowing it to be hijacked) and diffusing it from its intended meaning.

Batliwala shares four trends that led to the separation of empowerment from its radical roots:

1. Consciousness-raising disappeared… and so did collective action. Women’s collectives (e.g., self-help groups in India) that were originally mobilized as spaces for raising consciousness about patriarchy (plus other oppressive structures) and taking collective action were subsumed into and displaced by the overhyped micro-credit movement. (Personal note: I totally fell for the microcredit hype circa 2005. Ah, the things we thought we knew…)

2. Donors wanted to measure empowerment easily and quickly. The growing demand for results-based management and fast, easily quantifiable results was too much of a contrast with the complexity and unpredictability that is fundamental to empowerment.

3. Rights-based approaches demanded “professionals.” The 1990s saw a greater emphasis on human rights-based approaches, which shouldn’t necessarily be a problem except that it resulted in shifting agency away from the grassroots: “into the hands of professional intermediaries (lawyers, NGO activists, policy specialists)” (563). It also put greater focus on formal institutions (e.g., laws, policies) over informal structures (e.g., norms, beliefs, ideologies), even though patriarchy is embedded within both formal and informal spaces.

4. Empowerment became solely about the individual. Remember that empowerment, in its original intention, was about shifts in power between and among individuals AND groups. But with the growth in consumerist, individualist ideologies of the 1990s, we saw empowerment used mainly to refer to an individual process, and not a core part of systemic, societal change. Corporations promoted the individualized language as a sort of management strategy.

What’s the takeaway?

I have a few takeaways from Batliwala’s account for gender justice advocates and development practitioners.

First, the co-option of empowerment has lessons for current advocacy for “feminist” policies. Batliwala wrote that this history “warn[s] us that the subversion of powerful political techniques that organise the marginalised will always first occur through the co-option and distortion of its language” (564). Women’s empowerment began as a radical, grassroots movement to challenge oppressive patriarchal institutions and top-down development. But when those institutions adopted the language of empowerment, advocates saw the term lose its meaning and repackaged into programs and trends that arguably just sustained the status quo.

Because history has a way of repeating itself, we should ask ourselves: where might we see similar co-optation happening today? For example, I have concerns that the same process will play out in the increasingly popular use “feminist” by governments and INGOs to describe their policies, principles, and practices. By advocating for global hegemonic powers like the United States to adopt a “feminist foreign policy,” are we setting the stage for feminist to lose its radical meaning just as empowerment did in the 1980s and 90s?

Second, we must ask – or, better, demand – the power players to explain what they mean by terms at risk of co-optation, like empowerment and feminist.

Batliwala wrote that “everybody concerned with women’s issues and gender equality – state actors, aid agencies, development professionals, and feminist activists and advocates – was using the term empowerment. But in this latter-day development Babel, there was no clarity about what exactly it meant to its various proponents” (559).

Every time a new donor, government, bilateral or multilateral agency and/or major INGO comes out with a program or initiative focused around empowerment, feminism, or another of the latest buzzwords, we should all be asking them to be very clear and explicit about what they mean by those terms – and what they don’t. Tip: Ask them to explain it without using acronyms or jargon.

Finally, I want to offer the idea that reading this history, reflecting on it, and sharing it with you is – at least in part – a way to embody the intended empowerment practices of ‘conscientisation’ and popular education. Our work toward equality, justice, and empowerment for all people marginalized by gender is part of a long political and economic history of advocacy and struggle to find the balance between compromise and co-option. Articles like this help to remind myself of that history and struggle, so that I can (try to) recognize these trends when they re-emerge in different forms. I share this with you in the spirit of popular education and am eager to hear your reactions as well. What other takeaways do you have? If you’ve read the article, do you agree with my synopsis and interpretation of her article?

Coming up: what about women's economic empowerment? Batliwala’s article was published in 2007, which was right around the time when the women’s empowerment terminology was about to shift even further as women's economic empowerment began to gain traction. By specifically emphasizing economic, this trend has (in mine and others’ opinions) ultimately led to the further dissolution of empowerment as a social, economic, and political process, particularly at the collective level. Other articles further explain this, which I will be summarizing in future posts.

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1. Batliwala, Srilatha. “Taking the Power out of Empowerment – an Experiential Account.” Development in Practice 17, no. 4–5 (August 1, 2007): 557–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614520701469559.