Legal empowerment for local resource control

Training sessions unite men and women, young and old, leaders and regular citizens, literate and
non-literate members of the community, in order to discuss problems and potential solutions.
government or large corporations; and to strategies combining use of legal
processes with advocacy through media engagement and social
mobilisation. These diverse strategies, activities and support materials are
broadly referred to here as “para-legal tools”.
Para-legal tools are critical for legal empowerment for two reasons. First, as
explained earlier, they are instrumental to helping local resource users
make use of the law to their own advantage – thereby affecting power
asymmetries between them and other actors such as the central state
and/or foreign investors (“power by the law”, in the conceptual framework
followed here; see above, chapter 2.1.2). Second, different para-legal tools
are likely to have different implications for the relationship between legal
services organisations and their clients (“power in the law”; see above,
chapter 2.1.2). Use of appropriate para-legal tools may entail a shift from
approaches where legal services organisations act “on behalf of” their
clients but without much involvement of these; to approaches that
Amadou Diol / ARED
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