The salience of the concept of "empowerment" has been deductively claimed more often than carefully defined or inductively assessed by development scholars and practitioners alike. We use evidence from a mixed methods examination of the Kecamatan (subdistrict) Development Project (KDP) in rural Indonesia, which we define here as development interventions that build marginalized groups' capacity to engage local-level governing elites using routines of deliberative contestation. "Deliberative contestation" refers to marginalized groups' practice of exercising associational autonomy in public forums using fairness-based arguments that challenge governing elites' monopoly over public resource allocation decisions. Deliberative development interventions such as KDP possess a comparative advantage in building the capacity to engage because they actively provide open decision-making spaces, resources for argumentation (such as facilitators), and incentives to participate. They also promote peaceful resolutions to the conflicts they inevitably spark. In the KDP conflicts we analyze, marginalized groups used deliberative contestation to moderately but consistently shift local-level power relations in contexts with both low and high preexisting capacities for managing St Comp Int Dev (2008) 43:151-180 were key members of the research team and played an integral role in developing the ideas explored here. Other field-level researchers provided ideas throughout the study. We are also indebted to Scott Guggenheim and Ruth Alsop for their active support and feedback, and to Dan Biller, Patrick Barron, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments. The views are those of the authors, and should not be attributed to the organizations with which they are affiliated.conflict. By contrast, marginalized groups in non-KDP development conflicts from comparable villages used "mobilizational contestation" to generate comparatively erratic shifts in power relations, shifts that depended greatly on the preexisting capacity for managing conflict.

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The notion of 'empowerment' has been more often deductively claimed than carefully defined or inductively assessed, by development scholars and practitioners alike. We define and assess empowerment through an in-depth examination of the extent to which a large community development project in rural Indonesia empowers participants (especially members of marginalized groups) through building their capacity to manage local conflict. Although the project induces conflict through its deployment of a competitive bidding process, we argue that, when well implemented, it can also enable otherwise unequal groups to more peacefully, equitably, and effectively engage one another. Using a mixed methods approach, we compare cases from otherwise similar 'treatment' and 'control' villages to shed light on the chief components of villagers' capacity to manage local conflict. We discuss the interdependencies of two major analytical realms-routines of inter-group collaboration, and sources of 'countervailing power'-and their relation to local conflict processes and outcomes.

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