Researching women's empowerment: Reflections on methodology by southern feminists

Abstract

Women's empowerment has gained a central role in development literature and feminist discourses over the last few decades. It is a contested concept, claimed and used by different groups—policymakers, development practitioners, feminist academics, grassroots activists—all promoting different agendas. At present, feminists working in the area of gender and development have a broad consensus on the following understandings of empowerment. First, they largely agree that in mainstream development policy and practice, empowerment has been envisaged as individual, focused on entrepreneurship and self reliance rather than challenging power structures (Sharma, 2008; Wilson, 2008). There is an ongoing critique of this understanding and a call to move beyond this focus and emphasize that empowerment is a transformative process that is predicated upon group solidarity (Kabeer, 1994). Second, they point out that though in recent years there has been a general shift towards recognition of the intrinsic value of empowerment even by actors such as the World Bank in policy discourse1 (World Bank, 2012), the focus of development actors on women's empowerment is still instrumentalist. Third, both feminists and some policy actors agree that the understandings and meanings of women's empowerment are contextually based and that women's empowerment has multiple dimensions (Aziz, Shams, & Khan, 2011; Batliwala & Pitman, 2011; Kabeer, 1999; Malhotra, Schuler, & Brender, 2002; Parpart, Rai, & Staudt, 2002).