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take effect quickly. Individual uncertainty aboutimplementation encourages poor people to withholdsupport for reforms, which can create self-fulfillingprophecies of slippage. One should thereforelook for interventions promising short-term rewardsfor beneficiaries. Design simplicity should be a keyconsideration to minimise conflict, uncertainty, andother implementation problems arising from theprocedural and technical traits of legal empowermentactivities.Roadmaps to ImplementationEffective implementation of policy reform takesa mix of experience, professional judgment, andwillingness to take chances. Creative policymakerslook to open up policy windows that create thespace needed to move forward in solving particularproblems even under difficult circumstances.Six common sets of tasks are associated withdeveloping specific national roadmaps for LegalEmpowerment of the Poor. They follow a generalized(but not lockstep) pattern, conceived as aninteractive cycle launched by a stream of issues,agendas and decisions that, over time, provide additionalinput and momentum to the process.• Issues, Agendas, and Decisions: Advocate forchange, develop policy issues, and make decisionsto launch policy reforms. Although politiciansand interest groups tend to take the lead,they will seldom succeed without pressure frombelow, and mobilisation from among the poorthemselves, including their demands.• Policy Formulation and Legitimisation: Addressthe technical content of reform measures. However,besides technical content, reform measuresneed to be accepted and be seen as necessaryand important. Through their representatives, thepoor should be part of the reform design process.• Constituency Building: Convince beneficiaries ofthe advantages of reforms, and demonstrate thatlong-term benefits are worth short-term costs.• Resource Mobilisation: Ensure the flow of adequateresources by addressing incentives, andexercising leadership in galvanizing constituencies.Financial, technical, and human resourcecommitments are needed.• Implementation Design and Organisational Development:Reformers need to create and nurturenetworks and partnerships for cooperation andcoordination, and provide for the developmentof new organisational skills and capacities in thepublic, private and non-governmental sectors.Old procedures, operating routines, and communicationpatterns are difficult to root out; changeis likely to be resisted within some quarters.• Action Planning and Progress Monitoring: Set upsystems and procedures for obtaining feedbackso that implementation is related to learning andadaptation, so as to produce results and impact.Legal Empowerment of the Poor may be perceivedas a spectrum that provides opportunities, protectionand security to beneficiaries. It establishes aminimum ‘floor’ of entitlements and safeguardsto which everyone is entitled, by the simple factof our common humanity. The task is to establishthis floor using human rights law. For every facetof empowerment, therefore, one test is to identifya range of potential policy options from which nationsand citizens can choose, depending on theirnational context and the different starting points ofvarious groups of the poor within them. Finally, aspectrum approach explicitly recognises the incrementalmanner in which poor people improve theirlives in practice.Implementation of empowering policies at thenational level should seek to integrate legalempowerment into existing processes, such asthe preparation of national development plans orpoverty reduction strategies, rather than seek to278