DIPLOMARBEIT - ÖH Uni Wien - Universität Wien

economically, legally or socially. The different aspects of a women`s life are all linked andtherefore all need to be considered in order to empower women. Furthermore, women shouldbe involved in all phases of the project`s process, indicators of empowerment should bespecified and women`s groups supported because they contribute effectively to women`sempowerment (UNDP 2001: 97f.). “Empowerment is a useful concept because it emphasizesthe idea of women as active agents in, rather than passive recipients of, developmentstrategies” (Khan/Ara 2006: 90).Batliwala, an Indian feminist activist and researcher, criticizes that empowerment is just usedas a buzzword like many other terms and concepts in development cooperation. The term wasmainstreamed and thus it is just a “distortion of good ideas and innovative practices as theyare lifted out of the political and historical context in which they evolved and rendered intoformulas that are ‘mainstreamed’ ” (Batliwala 2007: 89 in Batliwala 2007: 557). This means,good, specific, appropriate ideas for particular development challenges are now changed touniversally applicable strategies and hence not as effective and efficient anymore. Accordingto Batliwala empowerment became a “magic bullet for poverty alleviation and rapideconomic development” (Batliwala 2007: 561) for development agencies, which does notstrive for long-term social transformations concerning gender roles (Batliwala 2007: 561).One problem of the empowerment approach is that it needs a lot of time until its results can beseen and they are also hard to measure. Women`s empowerment is subjective and itsjudgement depends on the measurer`s values. This is a problem because it is mostly white,Western, middle-class women who evaluate the empowerment of poor, black women indeveloping countries (Mohanty 1991 in Mercer 2002: 103).As the brief illustrations given above show, the terms gender, participation and empowermentgained importance in the development discourse. Today terms like gender, participation andempowerment are used in the field of development cooperation all the time and areconsidered as the solution to all kinds of problems all over the world. Words like gender,participation and empowerment have a so-called feel-good character that makes peopleconvinced of their rightness without questioning development agencies what exactly theimplementation of these strategies implies. According to Cornwall and Brock, ananthropology professor and a social scientist from the UK, it is necessary to ask whether thestrategies have positive effects in practice or if the nice words are just used by development13