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Date Added to
Site: 25th April 2006 |
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Short Summary
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| Title |
Policy Arena. Assessing Women’s Empowerment:
Towards a Conceptual Framework |
| Author |
Mosedale, S. |
| Publication
Date |
March 2005 |
| Publisher |
Routledge |
| Volume |
Journal of International Development |
| Series |
17, 2: 243–257 |
| Donor |
Routledge |
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Short Summary |
When policymakers and practitioners decide that
'empowerment'— usually of women or the poor — is a development goal,
what do they mean? And how do they determine the extent to which it
has been achieved? Despite empowerment having become a widely used
term, there is no universally accepted method for measuring and tracking
changes. Presumably if we want to see people empowered we consider
them to be currently disempowered i.e. disadvantaged by the way power
relations presently shape their choices, opportunities and well-being.
If this is what we mean then we would benefit from being better informed
about the debates which have shaped and refined the concept of power
and its operation. This paper briefly reviews how women's empowerment
has been discussed within development studies, how the concept of
power was debated and refined during the second half of the twentieth
century and how power relations might be described and evaluated in
a particular context. A conceptual framework of empowerment is then
proposed that is based on women identifying their contextualized gender
constraints, and the process by which women redefine and extend what
is possible for them to be and do.
This article is available from Journal of International Development
by subscription, see: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/jissue/109931317
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| Summary Source |
Adapted from author |
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