Women’s empowerment: What works and why?

Politically informed approaches to working on gender equality in fragile and conflict-affected contexts

“…Capacity building support must be tailored to these context-specific factors and link women in meaningful ways to existing processes and institutions. Indeed, as (Coomaraswamy, 2015 [14]) argues, offering capacity building as a road to inclusion in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, when this is not linked to wider meaningful change processes, is often just a way of continuing women's exclusion.…”

Co-opting cattle spaces: Women, cattle, and empowerment in Northwestern Botswana

“…This paper begins with the premise that gender empowerment is a dynamic, spatially contingent process of repeated performance whereby women are able to extend their possibilities for action and strategic choice-making (Cornwall and Edwards, 2016; Kabeer, 1999; Kesby, 2005). More specifically, we conceptualize empowerment as the process of changing subjectivities and ideologies regarding women’s place within the home and wider society, and recognizing the preconditions for these changes.…”

“…The complex trajectory of the empowerment concept and its related discourse reflects philosophical tensions in gender and development literature and practice (see Alsop and Heinsohn, 2005; Batliwala, 2007; Cornwall and Edwards, 2016; Humphries et al., 2012; Kabeer, 1999; Malhotra and Schuler, 2005; Momsen, 2004, 2010; Mosedale, 2005). In the 1990s, mainstream development organizations appropriated empowerment for managed intervention strategies with specific and measurable outcomes (Cornwall, 2002; Momsen, 2004; Mosedale, 2005; Parpart et al., 2002; Rowlands, 1998).…”

“…The implications of these outcomes relate to reshaping subjectivities and the internalization of capacities that women in Botswana were not thought to possess. It is useful to draw upon critical consciousness to describe these transformative outcomes, whereby people develop the ability to reflect on or critically assess their own power and subsequently challenge power relations (a form of power within) (Cornwall, 2016; O’Hara and Clement, 2018).…”

“…Development scholars and institutions have highlighted empowerment as a key concept to understand change and transformation in people’s lives in the developing world (Cornwall and Edwards, 2014; Kabeer, 2008; Mosedale, 2005; World Bank, 2012). Feminist development scholars in particular have identified empowerment as a dynamic process by which those who have been denied the ability for strategic choice-making gain such an ability (Cornwall, 2016; Cornwall and Edwards, 2016; Humphries et al., 2012; Kabeer, 1999, 2008; Mosedale, 2005). Feminist geographers and feminist political ecologists can complement existing scholarship by addressing the missing spatial component of empowerment conceptualizations and illuminating human–environment relations of power.…”