Power, Rights, and Poverty: Concepts and Connections

A working meeting sponsored by DFID and the World Bank

Publication date: Thursday 03 February 2005

The World Bank kindly gave us permission to publish this working report that brings together background materials and discussions from a two-day working meeting on “Power, Rights, and Poverty Reduction” held jointly by the World Bank and the United Kingdom Department for International Development in March 2004. The meeting represented an important step in our continuing effort to understand issues of empowerment, power, and human rights, and how they influence and are influenced by our work.

While empowerment has been identified to be of instrumental value in contributing to evelopmental effectiveness, good governance, and growth, empowerment is equally of value intrinsically in improving people’s lives. Whether it is a Brazilian woman gaining a mailing address and thereby having a better chance at securing a job, a Bolivian man acquiring an identity card and with it a right to vote, or urban slum dwellers in South Africa organizing to influence policymaking, these experiences remind us that, while there is still much ground to cover, enabling citizens to claim their positions as equal members of society can have an enormous impact on their lives.

Since the World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, empowerment has been increasingly addressed across many networks and sectors within the Bank. The Bank has clearly committed itself to working to empower poor people. However, for our work to be effective, there is further consolidation and substantive work to be done, and this working meeting was one way of building on experience to take forward these agendas.

An empowerment approach has direct relevance to rights-based approaches to development, which are based on a sense of justice and equity in relations between people, as well as the idea that individuals have a set of entitlements for which the state is responsible to advance, promote, and protect. But it’s in the practice of poverty reduction that we really see the links and the differences. In researching the paper I helped prepare on poverty reduction strategies for a recent meeting in New York on Human Rights and Development, it became clear that much of the poverty work of the World Bank and other donors is informed by the same notions of equality and non-discrimination that are central to human rights and empowerment approaches to development. For example, the PRSP model seeks to increase accountability and transparency and to enhance citizen inclusion in policymaking and governance—all central features of both rights and empowerment approaches to development. The papers in this volume suggest strong conceptual affinities between rights and empowerment approaches to poverty alleviation. They also suggest that the two approaches overlap strongly but that in practice an empowerment approach is more likely to have the effect of reinforcing citizen rights rather than directly addressing them. The diff erence between PRSPs, which incorporate an empowerment approach to poverty reduction, and human rights approaches is that the former are operational strategies necessarily acknowledging resource constraints and seeking explicitly to deal with tradeoffs. Human rights approaches on the other hand, widely characterized as legitimate claims that give rise to correlative obligations or duties, focus more on the fulfillment of legal obligations of states to citizens.

Issues of empowerment, power, and rights are not simple ones to grasp, and must be addressed with care and thoughtfulness. We must begin by understanding what these concepts mean on the ground, and how our existing activities and tools can support their development. We offer this volume as an initial contribution to this effort, and hope that it will provoke broader discussions and action with the goal of improving the scale and success of our work. We welcome your reactions and contributions.

Gobind Nankani
Vice President
Poverty Reduction and Economic Management