Empowerment as a panacea for poverty - old wine in new bottles? Reflections on the World Bank’s conception of power

Abstract

The World Bank has been accused of ‘power blindness’ for three reasons: its neglect of political power; its disregard for the power dynamic in inter-personal relationships; and its undemocratic corporate culture. However, power blindness, as commonly defined, does not offer a satisfactory picture of the Bank’s actual conception of power used in the poverty agenda. Using a feminist framework of power, I demonstrate an evolving and transforming concept of power in the Bank’s poverty alleviation policies over the past two decades. Four concepts of power are outlined: power-to; power-with; power-over; and power-from-within. The Bank’s stress on economic power and the calculated adoption of two ‘positive’ powers -‘power-to’ and ‘power-with’ -are seen as being the key features in combating poverty. Power, in the Bank’s perspective, is instrumental in nature and is a means to achieve economic efficiency. This overly limited vision of power is not without its problems. The new idea of empowerment, propounded as a solution to poverty in the World Development Report 2000/2001, actually follows the Bank’s conventional principle of power, and fails to offer any new developmental thinking. This paper examines critiques of the Bank’s analysis of power regarding the dark sides of ‘power-to’ and ‘power-with’, and the possibilities of including ‘power-over’ and ‘power-from-within’ in the debate. In the last section, it questions the feminist idea of power, given the diverse nature of women, the desirability of the inclusion of men and the significance of socially embedded power.