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Introduction: Vulnerability and Empowerment
This issue of Journal of Global Ethics draws together a thematic collection on the paired topics of human vulnerability and human empowerment. A selection of papers has been developed following presentations at “Gender Justice and Development: Local and Global,” a conference of the International Development Ethics Association, hosted at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, USA, in June 2011. Two papers that also serve to highlight these themes have been selected from among those received by the journal, and a brief essay that develops them within a recent political context completes the issue.
Vulnerability and empowerment are central concepts for ethics in development and in development cooperation. Many development programmes now focus on improving the wellbeing of the most vulnerable by empowering them economically, socially and politically. As Stacy Kosko reminds us in this issue, vulnerability is a term that means susceptibility to wounding. It certainly does not appear to be a promising condition in that regard. Philosophers will nevertheless accept vulnerability as central to the human condition (consider Thomas Hobbes, for one), and some will value it positively, as an element of an ethic of care (Carol Gilligan, citing Erik Erikson). Denis Goulet, in The Cruel Choice, has proposed that those in positions of relative invulnerability should choose to adopt vulnerabilities for the sake of re-humanizing their relations with others. Goulet seeks to undermine differences in power, the recognition of which he takes to be the very source of underdevelopment. Just this year, Joan Tronto, in Caring Democracy, takes the acknowledgement of vulnerability as central to a citizen’s role. The condition that Hobbes would control by all means necessary has undergone a restoration, as the papers within this issue of Journal of Global Ethics further attest.
Vulnerability has returned as a philosophically pertinent category, but the specific dimensions of vulnerability require further ethical appraisal. Infrequently, a shared and voluntary vulnerability can be a positive aspect of group identification (as may currently be seen in the condition of avowed Chicago White Sox baseball fans, who have seen the worst season in forty years). Misery loves company, and builds community, at least on occasion. More frequently, the recognition of wounds and of specific vulnerabilities is followed by calls for remedy and for empowerment as a just form of remedy.
Empowerment is the primary focus of two theoretical papers that open this issue. Jay Drydyk’s contribution argues that empowerment must be carefully distinguished from agency, since agency, even as a technical term in development ethics, is too thin a concept to support consideration of the relational aspect of power, and of power’s effects on well-being. If dominance and subjection are characteristics found within a society, then an increase in agency for nearly all (say, in the abundant opportunity that arises with the spread of the internet) may nevertheless also reduce the power of some, and perhaps also reduce their well-being freedom (for some may become subject to more thorough monitoring and perhaps also to debilitating fear, as a consequence). Drydyk argues that some individuals and groups are “asymmetrically vulnerable,” since their well-being may not be advanced alongside an increase in their agency under conditions of dominance by others. He presents a collection of brief cases in development contexts that illustrate changes producing different realizations of empowerment, one of which has parallels to the technological example above, and one of which considers the role of solidarity as an option that reduces vulnerability.
Christine Koggel continues Drydyk’s discussion of the connections of freedom, well-being and empowerment by viewing these concepts as well as Drydyk’s own discussion of them through the lens of feminist relational theory. Koggel notes five dimensions of inquiry that the relational approach promotes as she considers “the power residing in dominant norms, structures and institutions” that shape, delimit, and forward women’s empowerment. She considers institutions and relations discussed in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, which itself features explicit discussion of gender norms and a theoretical orientation that invokes Sen’s Development as Freedom. Koggel also examines the relational focus in a background paper for the 2013 World Development Report by Patti Petesch. Petesch discusses gender dynamics and new opportunities for women’s economic activity in conflict and post-conflict situations in Liberia, Sudan, Afghanistan and West Bank and Gaza.
Gail Presbey also presents a study of change and empowerment in women’s lives within a biographical essay that considers Wangari Maathai and covers Maathai’s own thoughts. Presbey enriches her discussion of Maathai by introducing parallel themes and relevant analysis from other East African authors. She extends her account of Maathai’s life to the arc of Kenyan women’s lives more generally, bringing news of women’s increasing presence in Kenyan politics and their increasing independence from men as heads of households and landholders in the eyes of the law. Presbey notes particular progress for women following constitutional reforms of 2010.
The articles that follow these turn more directly to focus upon vulnerability itself, both how it is characterized and how empowerment and participation can reduce it. Stacy Kosko considers the self-determination of indigenous groups, including the conditions under which they choose to participate in shared governance. Developing a line of thought from Denis Goulet and David Crocker, Kosko presents a scale of political participation and self-determination that serves as a framework for evaluating non-elite participation in governance. Serene Khader continues work she commenced in Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment (Oxford 2011), developing a nuanced response to postcolonial feminist critics who argue that adaptive preference is a misconception born of a misunderstanding of oppression. Khader does allow that “the range of applicability of the concept of adaptive preference is smaller than typically thought” and she introduces a more fine-grained account of value distortion that notes cases of limited distortion, cases of choices made as tradeoffs to gain some of what is valued, cases of misperception of facts by the agent, and cases of misunderstanding that arises on the part of the interpreter.
Vida Panitch presents a particular case of economic vulnerability in a study of the global commerce in surrogacy. The gap in wealth between prospective parents and surrogate produces a failure of both justice and consent as these are taken to be conditions of just exchange in Alan Wertheimer’s characterization of mutually advantageous exploitation. Panitch argues that the relation counts as coercion because bargaining power on the part of the surrogate is lacking due to her limited economic options. Panitch argues that this suggests a negative right of the surrogate against the state, rather than a right against the prospective parents: a right not to be in such a position of limited options. Panitch suggests that empowerment may be achieved in this situation not by banning surrogacy; instead, a “significant portion of the state revenue from commercial surrogacy in India ought to be invested in female empowerment goals … [through] investment in women’s education, literacy, health, employment options, and general resource shares … as necessitated by the reproductive rights of its female citizens.”
Two articles from writing recently accepted at the journal appear to particularly complement these discussions of vulnerability and empowerment, and so they have been included in this special issue. Anupam Pandey provides an extensive review of “third world” ecofeminist activism and literature. Like Presbey, Pandey visits the case of Maathai, but she focuses more particularly on Maathai’s place as activist in a global social movement, indicating parallels between Maathai’s own Green Belt Movement and the Garhwal (India) Chipko Movement and Maiti Movement of Nepal. Drawing from both activist and theoretical sources, Pandey theorizes a “southern materialist ecofeminism” as a political project explicitly directed against globalization and grounded in “a bonding between nature and women based on the labor of women.” Ann Cudd presents an argument of a very different character, considering norms for international humanitarian intervention in support of women’s autonomy and against oppressive state and social institutions. Cudd’s argument amounts to a reflection upon the balance between cosmopolitan responsibility and state sovereignty that is informed both by a women’s rights perspective and by the emerging international norm of “Responsibility to Protect.” Finally, also pertinent to the subject of intervention, Stephen Esquith completes the issue with a discussion note concerning recent events in Mali. Esquith reflects upon former U.S. Ambassador to Mali Robert Pringle’s suggestion that “Mali’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become a fourth branch of government … so important that the time has come for more energetic self-regulation, if only to ensure that their services are equitably distributed.” Esquith extends this interpretation to indicate how NGOs bear a particular responsibility as interested bystanders that, in their efforts to address urgent humanitarian concerns, may in such cases inadvertently produce long-term dependence by fragile, undemocratic governing structures.
Thanks to many who provided advice and refereeing for the special issue. Amrita Banerjee, Sirkku Hellsten, Will Kymlicka and Andie Palmer contributed helpful referee work and criticism, as did several of these authors, for the benefit of each other. The Denis Goulet Memorial Prize in Development Ethics was awarded to two papers presented at the Bryn Mawr conference by Shalini Iyengar and Stacy Kosko. A revised version of Iyengar’s paper appears in Révue Ethique et Economique 10:2 as “A Tangled Web? Asking the Gender Question in the Multilateral Development Banks’ Law and Justice Policies in India,” and a revised version of Stacy Kosko’s paper appears in this issue of JGE. Thanks goes to the Goulet Prize committee for its work: to Nigel Dower, Workineh Kelbessa and Lori Keleher, as well as to Asuncion St. Clair, President of IDEA, and past President Jay Drydyk. Thanks go especially to Christine Koggel, the primary organizer of the IDEA 2011 conference, and to Cynthia Bisman and Jay Drydyk for their aid in its development. A distinct selection of papers from the conference, many of which are of relevance to themes of this issue, may be found in a special issue of Ethics and Social Welfare edited by Cynthia Bisman and Christine Koggel (6:3, September 2012).
Thanks also to to the editors of Journal of Global Ethics for allowing this special issue to take form.
Eric Palmer
Allegheny College, USA
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Empowerment, agency, and power
Jay Drydyk
Department of Philosophy, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
As ‘empowerment’ and ‘agency’ have received wider usage within development research and policy, ambiguities and variant meanings have proliferated. Amidst this conceptual drift, there has also been a tendency to assimilate the two concepts. This tendency is problematic in a number of ways. First, ‘agency’ has various meanings, and the weakest of these captures little of the concept of empowerment. Second, empowerment has a conceptual link with well-being that agency cannot have. Third, when empowerment is assimilated with expanded agency, that agency is not considered in a relational way: the focus is on how the agency of a group or individual becomes greater than it was, not on the degree to which their agency is dependent on or dominated by the agency of others. If ‘empowerment’ no longer refers to social relations, it loses its direct relevance to the transformation of those relations and, as some critics have claimed, it ceases to be a ‘transformative’ concept. After showing that there are cases of empowerment that cannot be captured by conceptions of empowerment that ‘take power out’, I draw upon the capability approach to propose relational conceptions of agency and empowerment that ‘bring power back in’.
Introduction
It is nearly customary by now to begin a conceptual article on empowerment by lamenting how confused the concept has become over the last decade. Keleher has shown, for instance, how the meaning of ‘empowerment’ for economic-growth conceptions of development diverges from its meaning for the capability approach (2007, 2008). But confusion about the meaning of ‘empowerment’ is evident even within the human development approach. In Human Development Report 2000, Human Rights and Human Development (UNDP 2000) one encounters ‘empowering’ everywhere, but with various meanings and no discussion of what they have in common. In the chapter titled ‘Rights Empowering People in the Fight Against Poverty’, ‘empower’ is used as a synonym either for ‘enable’ or for ‘enable and motivate’. Other uses are more specific: the Gender Empowerment Measure, for instance, pertains to ‘whether women are able to actively participate in social and economic life’ (18).1
A similar misfortune seems to be overtaking the concept of agency. After ages of philosophical debate about the meaning of ‘agency’, development scholars are now joining in. Sabina Alkire, who earlier reported 30 different definitions of ‘empowerment’ (Ibrahim and Alkire 2007, 380–403), has observed a similar tendency for ‘agency’ (Alkire 2008). Of course, it could be argued that this is not such a misfortune, but rather a sign of progress, indicating that both concepts are now being fitted and adapted in a more nuanced way to the real world of development.
In addition to this conceptual drift, there is also a tendency to assimilate the two concepts. Alkire, for instance, sometimes switches from one to the other in mid-sentence, on one occasion noting that they are ‘related but often differently defined’ (2008, 2). Before this process of semantic assimilation continues, we must wonder whether anything will be lost if ‘expanded agency’ and ‘empowerment’ are eventually regarded as synonyms. Both terms are clearly important to the human development approach, of which the central aim is to ‘put people back into development’. Indeed, Haq listed empowerment as one of the four central ideals of the human development approach (1995, 16). Will this be watered down somehow if ‘empowerment’ is taken to mean nothing more than ‘expanded agency’?
One concern arises from reflection on how the meaning of ‘empowerment of women’ has changed since it was endorsed in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing. There its connotations included transformation of gender relations (Eyben and Napier-Moore 2009, 287) and other power relations with which they are linked (Batliwala 2007, 559). That was often how activists, too, understood ‘empowerment’. In 1992, when Batliwala led an Asia-wide study of how empowerment was understood by civil society organisations that made women’s empowerment their stated objective, she found that they ‘defined empowerment as a process, and the results of a process, of transforming the relations of power between individuals and social groups’ (1993, 2007, 560). Within 10 years, however, the relational conception had fallen out of use in development institutions, replaced by the expanded-choice conception. According to a recent study of OECD Development Assistance Committee, the UK Department for International Development, the Swedish International Development Agency, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank, ‘Today, most frequently, empowerment is about choice, decision-making, realising opportunities and potential, and community action’ (Eyben and Napier-Moore 2009, 291). The new idea of empowerment as choice-expansion is neither relational nor transformative; it has no connotations referring to gender relations or other power relations; nor does it imply any transformation of social relations. Thus, to advocate empowerment in this new sense is no longer to advocate transformation of gender relations. This has provoked various reactions from people whose conceptions of empowerment are relational: Batliwala holds that, if it is the overly diluted idea of empowerment as choice-expansion that prevails in development discourse, it is better to give up on ‘empowerment’ and seek another vocabulary for advocating transformation of gender relations (2007, 564), while others contend that ‘empowerment’ should not be abandoned, that it is better to resist the expanded-choice conception and struggle for wider acceptance of a relational, transformative conception. These concerns apply directly to agency conceptions of empowerment, since thinking of empowerment as expanded agency is a specific way to think of empowerment as expanded choice.
Before addressing the power issue, I will consider other conceptual gaps between empowerment and agency, along with attempts that have been made to bridge them. This analysis will show that, while empowerment entails expanded agency, it is not reducible to expanded agency, because empowerment has a conceptual l...
