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EXECUTIVE SUMMARYExisting power structures prevent poor people from taking charge of their lives and occupations andachieving upward mobility. To end poverty, those structures must be reorganised — a challenging task dueto the many dimensions of poverty and disempowerment. Interchangeable solutions do not work acrosscountries in exactly the same ways; practitioners must be inventive and experimental to produce more justrelationships among the state, the marketplace and the poor.Listening to the poor and learning by doingare critically important. Civil societies,non-governmental organisations, membership-basedgroups of employers and of workers,coalitions and networks have major roles to play ingenerating and articulating bottom-up demand forlegal empowerment. Support of central authoritiesis also vital for sustaining progress in most countries.Policy champions are needed to bring othergovernment actors on board to preclude policyspoilers from blocking implementation of legalempowerment.Implementation of Legal Empowerment of the Poor(Legal Empowerment of the Poor) in a countrybegins with contextual analysis, focusing on thesocial and cultural features that could affectimplementation. Consideration must also be givento the economic context (which can be both a helpand a hindrance), and to the openness and capacityof the state. Supplementing the inventory ofthese concerns should be a careful analysis of thereach and hold that informal institutions have onthe poor. A full contextual analysis forms the basisfor a feasibility review of various empowermentscenarios.The most important constraints set by the nationalsocio-political context are:• The domestic social structure, especially its gender,class and ethnic makeup, as well as culturalattitudes toward participation and equality;• The economic context — including the distributionof wealth and income, and the level and rateof economic growth;• The characteristics of the state — both the politicaland the administrative system;• The extent of economic and political informalityand tensions with the formal and officially recognisedsystems.Practitioners and policymakers can use the tool ofcontextual analysis within a country to determine:1) if conditions appear ripe for legal empowermentreforms; 2) which implementation options seemmost probable; 3) what sequencing and timelinesfor reform look doable; 4) how the reforms shouldbe designed; 5) what tradeoffs need to be considered;6) which risk-mitigating mechanisms areworth trying, and 7) what contextual variables needcareful monitoring during implementation.276