Discussing Women's Empowerment - Sida

26 RESOURCES, AGENCY, ACHIEVEMENTS • KABEER
materially possible but whether they were conceived to be within the
realms of possibility 4 .
Empowerment: dimensions, levels and processes of change
To sum up, the ability to choose has been made central to the concept of
power which informs the analysis in this paper. However, choice has been
qualified in a number of ways to make it relevant to the analysis. Qualifications
regarding the conditions of choice point to the need to distinguish
between choices made from the vantage point of real alternatives
and choices which reflect their absence or punishingly high costs. Qualifications
relating to the consequences of choice reflect the need to distinguish
between strategic life choices, those which represent valued ways of
‘being and doing’, and the other more mundane choices which follow
once these first-order choices have been made. The consequences of
choice can be further evaluated in terms of their transformatory significance,
the extent to which the choices made have the potential for challenging
and destabilising social inequalities and the extent to which they
merely express and reproduce these inequalities. Choices which express
the fundamental inequalities of a society, which infringe the rights of others
or which systematically devalue the self, are not compatible with the
notion of ‘empowerment’ being put forward in this paper.
These qualifications represent an attempt to incorporate the structural
dimensions of choice into our analysis. Structures operate through the
rules, norms and practices of different institutions to determine the resources,
agency and achievement possibilities available to different groups
of individuals in a society: our criteria of ‘alternatives’ (could they have
chosen otherwise?) recognises these larger constraints. However, the actions
and choices of individuals and groups can in turn act on structural
constraints, reinforcing, modifying and transforming them: our criteria of
‘consequences’ draws attention to these possibilities. Such a conceptualisation
of empowerment suggests that it can reflect change at a number
of different possible levels (Figure 2).
4. The importance of alternatives, material as well as discursive, is common to a number of analyses
of power. Lukes refers to the absence of actual or imagined alternatives as a factor explaining
the absence of protest to the injustices of an unequal order. Geuss (1981) suggests that knowledge
about social life and the self requires not only freedom from basic want but also the material
and cultural possibility of experimentation, of trying out alternatives, the freedom to experience
and to discuss the results of that experience. Shklar puts the question of alternatives eloquently
when she declares, ‘Unless and until we can offer the injured and insulted victims of the most of
the world’s traditional as well as revolutionary governments a genuine and practicable alternative
to their present condition, we have no way of knowing whether they really enjoy their
chains…’ . (1964. Legalism).