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Empowerment to participate: a case study of participation by indian sex workers in HIV prevention
Author(s) -
Cornish Flora
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of community and applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.042
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1099-1298
pISSN - 1052-9284
DOI - 10.1002/casp.866
Subject(s) - empowerment , public relations , sociology , women's empowerment , tokenism , popularity , psychological intervention , psychology , social psychology , political science , anthropology , law , psychiatry
The popularity of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ in international development discourse is not matched by sophisticated conceptualisation of these terms. Critics have argued that their vagueness allows ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ to be used indiscriminately to describe interventions which vary from tokenism to genuine devolving of power to the community. This paper suggests that conceptualising empowerment and participation simply in terms of a scale of ‘more or less’ participation or ‘more or less’ empowerment does not capture the qualitatively different forms of empowerment that are necessary for different activities. Instead, the paper conceptualises participation in terms of concrete domains of action in which people may be empowered to take part. An ethnographic case study of a participatory HIV prevention project run by sex workers in Kolkata illustrates the argument. Four domains of activity in which sex workers may participate are distinguished: (1) participating in accessing project services; (2) participating in providing project services; (3) participating in shaping project workers' activity; (4) participating in defining project goals. To be empowered to participate in each domain depends upon a different set of resources. Asking the question ‘empowerment to do what?’ of health promotion projects is proposed as a way of facilitating appropriate project design. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.