What kinds of changes does peace bring to everyday people? In a world where peace has become one of the main topics on the international political agenda; where millions of dollars are spent every year in peace operations; where a massive industry of international, national, governmental, and non-governmental organisations devote their efforts to peace; and where practitioners and academics continuously discuss peace-related issues and look for better solutions to promote sustainable peace worldwide, it would be expected that the answer to this question would be, at least, âmajor positive changesâ. Yet, not only are there major disagreements in the field regarding the success of current peacebuilding practices; but also many of the existing indicators of peace still say very little about what ordinary people who survive violent conflict have to say about peace and what they have gained from it. By everyday, ordinary people I mean the vast majority of those who live at the margins of the political system and are often silent and not taken into account when a peace accord is signed, when a new state is reshaped, and when new development policies are designed. They are also those who have usually been the main victims of violent conflictâthose who have had their lives disrupted, losing family members and being forced to hide and escape from their homes, from their lands, and from anything that gives them a sense of belonging and identity.
Whereas many existing indicators of peace focus on the measurement of objective (if not material) change, grasping the effects of theses change from the subjective and everyday perspective of local actors is far more challenging. This book constitutes an attempt to embrace this challenge. It is concerned with evaluating the long-term changes derived from peacebuilding, not only objectively, but also in terms of local subjectivitiesâin particular, the subjectsâ perceived change of her own personal power in the context of peace. This analysis entails a more general concern with power and its different manifestations during war and peace. Indeed, if war is a violent expression of power contests, it seems relevant to ask to what extent power dynamics within society change with peace, and, in particular, if democracy and economic liberalisationâas implemented in peace building contextsâare indeed means to redistribute power, or if they constitute mere formal mechanisms to prevent direct violence while maintaining huge power asymmetries. In this book, I use the concept of empowerment as a vehicle to examine these power dynamics in peace times. Empowerment becomes, thus, a way to measure the quality of the peace achieved in the medium- to long-term.
Since the early 1990s, the term empowerment has become a catchword in the international political agenda. In its current predominant use it indicates the official commitment of international institutions to incorporate local agentsâ inputs into their policies, mostly through participatory approaches, as well as the idea of capacity building, perceived as a means to increase peopleâs potential to pursue their own objectives. From this perspective, it reflects a soft approach to social engineering aimed at remodelling societies (and states) following general precepts that conform to an abstract model of a (neo)liberal democratic state. Yet, before its institutionalisation, the concept of empowerment was mostly linked to social movements and different expressions of competing dominant models of social organisation and had, therefore, a much more solid grassroots base, and a character of demand instead of supply. Thinking of empowerment in order to understand the effects of peace requires, therefore, the examination of the changing narrative of empowerment and its implications in terms of policy implementation and related outcomes in post-war contexts. In this regard, the current volume analyses empowerment by considering its various aspectsâthat is, as a discursive instrument, as an expected policy outcome, and as an analytical concept.
Specifically, this book has three general objectives. First, it aims to explore how the concept of empowerment has been defined and used in the academic and policy domains. Second, it aims to discuss the analytical usefulness of the concept in the analysis of peacebuilding by examining the two opposite and complementary ontologies of power (power-to and power-over) that underlie empowerment and by proposing a multilevel analytical framework. Third, the book aims to analyse how empowerment operates in practiceâas a discourse, policy and analytical toolâby focusing on the study of Mozambique.
Mozambique has been generally portrayed at the international level as a successful case of peacebuilding. This âsuccessâ has been characterized largely by the political stability that has endured in the post-war years and the economic recovery demonstrated by the achievement of stable macro-economic indicators in the last two decades. Yet these two factors say very little about change at the everyday level. Indeed, Mozambique remains one of the poorest countries in world, with very low human-development indicators, which shows the limitations of the peace-dividend distribution. More recently, even the countryâs political stability has suffered a setback, as the main opposition party (i.e., Renamo, previously a rebel group) resumed fighting in 2013, after calling off the 1992 Peace Accords and pushing for a series of reforms that included a controversial revision of the electoral law. In September 2014 a new peace deal was signed, followed by national elections for the presidency and provincial assemblies. Instead of leading to a new period of stability, the results of the elections were contested by Renamoâs leader, Afonso Dhlakama, who has been pushing for aradical revision of the national policy for decentralisation. In the absence of an agreement between Renamo and the government, sporadic clashes continue to take place.
Notwithstanding these recent events, and because it has been stable for at least 20 years after the signing of the peace agreements, Mozambique provides a good platform to analyse long-term change, in particular, the changes in the lives of ordinary people. In this regard, this book examines post-war changes in Mozambique focusing on two different dimensions: On the one hand, it explores the macro-changes related to the process of democratisation and post-war development policies that shaped peacebuilding in the country and their effects on peopleâs empowerment. On the other hand, it focuses on a case study that looks more deeply into the local dimension and daily lives of ordinary people in the rural areas, and which is centred on a national initiative called the District Development Fund (FDD), popularly known as the 7 Million.
The 7 Million started in 2006, with a budget of 7 million meticais (hence the popular name) distributed to each of the 128 districts in Mozambique to be used for credit concessions to the poor strata of those economically active in the rural areas, and it soon became one of the most popular policies of President Guebuza (2005â2015). The initiative has a strong empowerment appeal that includes its potential effect on reducing poverty in the rural areas as well as a procedural aspect related to its engagement of local councils in the process leading to allocations of the fund. Because of this participatory aspect, the 7 Million is presented as a policy that places the local population at the centre of the agenda. Despite being a relatively small scheme in terms of budget (an average of 2% of the national budget), the 7 Million has gained a strong political appeal, being presented as one of the main tools in the fight against poverty. Whereas the 7 Million is not a peacebuilding policy per se, it is directly connected to the wider network of institutional changes that have taken place in Mozambique since the peace agreements, and has been portrayed as a further step in the countryâs process of decentralisation. Because of this, analysing this policy allows us to discuss several features that constitute part of these macro-changes as well as assess their cumulative effect in the long run, especially at the local level.
Specifically, this book addresses three questions in the analysis of Mozambique: First, to what extent have political and economic liberalisationâtwo basic templates of current peacebuilding practicesâcontributed to local empowerment after the peace agreements of 1992? Second, what is the connection between the logic that sustains empowerment policiesâand in this case the 7 Millionâand the logic that sustains social relations at the local level? Finally, what lessons can be drawn from the case of Mozambique, both in relation to similar policies as well as, more generally, peacebuilding? The answers to these questions, and the main contribution of this book, reside in the multilevel analysis of empowerment and the connection between the power dynamics that take place at each of these levelsâinternational, national, subnational, and local. Specifically, I argue that the rationale behind the 7 Million mirrors the mainstream international approaches to empowerment, which are mostly technical and linear. However, in practice, this rationale is detached from the complexities that sustain social practices, in particular in Mozambique. So, even though the 7 Million had some positive aspectsânotably including the districts and the local community in matters of governanceâits effects in promoting local empowerment have been far below its potential and often counterproductive. One of the reasons for this is to be found in the dynamics of powerâpower-to and power-overâthat take place at the local level and that, to a certain extent, reflect structural aspects linked to state formation in Mozambique and the power dynamics that take place at the national/governmental level. In consequence, existing power dynamics at the local level are often reinforced rather than changed by the 7 Million initiative. Moreover, this misalignment between the logic that sustains the empowering potential of the policy and the way power dynamics actually operate at the local level also reflects power dynamics that take place at the upper levels of the policy spectrum and that reveal important conflicts of interest regarding what the 7 Million should be. Seen in a wider context, the implementation of 7 Million points towards the contradictions in promoting âbottom-upâ empowerment from the âtop-downâ. This, in turn, reflects the limitations of social-engineering attempts at social transformation that are not demand-driven.
It should be noted that, whereas the 7 Million is a very specific case study, many of its features, in particular, its link with the local councils and the agenda of decentralisation, are common to other countries in Africa, such as Uganda, Ghana, and Tanzania. The 7 Million also draws on features that are common to micro-credit schemes implemented in many developing countries and has a similar appealâin particular, empowerment and poverty reduction. In this regard, even though the findings of this case study may not be generalisable, they provide the opportunity to draw some lessons that may be transferable to other cases where similar policies take place.
Research Overview
This book has two general concerns: On the one hand, it aims to explore the concept of âempowermentâ both as a theoretical concept as well as an expected policy outcome and discursive tool. On the other hand, it offers a grounded analysis of how empowerment policies are designed and implemented in the case of Mozambique. These different aims are reflected in the structure of the book, as well as the methodology followed in this study.
Structurally, this book is divided into three parts and a concluding chapter. The first part consists of two chapters that examine empowerment as a policy discourse as well as an academic and analytical concept. The analysis of empowerment as a policy discourse is based on two types of literature: On the one hand, I refer to key policy papers and reports from international agencies, in particular the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the biggest international institutions embracing empowerment as a central concept in their agendas. On the other hand, I offer a review of the academic literature on peacebuilding that focuses on the local level and which discusses not only empowerment, but related concepts, such as local ownership and emancipation. The conceptual analysis entails a thorough review of the theoretical literature on power and the much less developed conceptual literature on empowerment, as well as the proposition of a multilevel analytical framework.
The second part of the book introduces the case of Mozambique and addresses the structural aspects that condition local empowerment in this country from a historical perspective, culminating in the peacebuilding reforms that took place since 1992. These chapters are based on an extensive literature review of the history of Mozambique and correlate historical events with their influence in national dynamics of empowerment and disempowerment. Part of the analysis also includes first-hand material obtained during fieldwork, discussing specifically local subjectivities of peace and change.
Finally, the third part of the book concentrates on the specific case of the 7 Million and is fundamentally based on fieldwork conducted in Mozambique in 2012 and 2013. The purpose of the third part is to move from the structural level to the national and local domains where this policy was formulated and implemented. It is here where we have the opportunity to apply the empowerment framework more thoroughly and understand the micro-dynamics that affect this policy outcome.
The analysis of the 7 Million presented in the third part relies on a variety of primary data, which include a series of documents from official and non-official sources related to the 7 Million as well as first-hand data obtained during fieldwork in Mozambique, first between March and June 2012 and the second between April and May 2013. On both occasions I conducted a series of interviews and focus groups in the capital, Maputo, as well as in the city of Nampula and in the district of Angoche, the main locus of the fieldwork. In 2012 I also had the chance to go to the district of Moma, also in Nampula province, where I conducted additional focus groups and interviews with people from the Moma and Mogovolas districts in order to have a comparative view of the functioning of the local councils and the 7 Million. In 2013, besides gathering additional data in Angoche and Maputo, I also had the chance to present my preliminary research results and discuss them with some of the participants, including civil servants in Maputo, civil society organisations and civil servants in Nampula, as well as some members of the district technical commission in Angoche. This process was particular...