Empowerment and the Role of Advocacy in a Globalized World

Abstract

To understand empowerment, I argue, we need to situate it in a context of the growing impact of economic globalization on groups, communities, countries, and the people in them. I begin by using feminist and postcolonial insights on relations of power at local and global levels to sketch the central concepts of empowerment, advocacy, and globalization. I then use these insights to examine the World Bank's recent work on empowerment. While the World Bank is alert to the complexity of empowerment processes, it ignores the ways in which the local is increasingly being reshaped by features of economic globalization. This lack can be explained by the World Bank's role in the global context, one that assumes that economic globalization can alleviate the disempowerment of “poor people in poor countries”. This position undercuts its claims to advocate for the poor. Its role as advocate is problematic because it fails to attend to relationships at the global level, including relationships it develops with poor people and Third World countries. To give substance to this critique, I discuss work being done by SATUNAMA, a non-profit, non-political organization that advocates for and works to empower people in different regions and sectors of Indonesia.

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