The notion of empowerment

Full title


The notion of Empowerment as defined by participants of Urban Action School and Netritva Vicharshala


General Information


Project's Coordinator:
Sandeep Chachra, ActionAid India


Research Cluster:
Partnership in knowledge production: Eurocentrism and alternative knowledge


Keywords:
Adult Learning, Community Leaders, Empowerment, Exclusion, Marganilised Communities


Main Research Questions

  • Studying the contribution of leadership discourse schools (Netritva Vicharshala or referred to as NV hereafter) and urban action school in building community leadership and institutional capacity of adult learners, to strengthen their perspective on society, structure, culture, polity, and ideologies shaping social justice.
  • Researching significant factors leading to empowerment and politicization of individuals particularly belonging to marginalized communities such as Dalits, indigenous, DNTs & Religious Minorities from their perspective

Abstract

The ActionAid initiative, named as Netritiva Vicharshala (the leadership discourse) and the Urban Action School are geared towards providing grassroot activists, community leaders and young activists, with a socially just perspective through which they can analyze politics that shape everyday lives. The larger aim is to rebalance the structure/agency debate through insights about the power that exists within the society. It also allows for a greater understanding of the co-constitutive nature of politics; understanding and perspective on the economy, development; understanding feminism, power, and patriarchy.

While the Urban Action School provides a learning platform for young activists in urban spaces, the leadership school aims at empowering individuals from marginalized and excluded communities at the grassroot level.

These institutions have also provided individuals a space to upgrade knowledge, build practitioner knowledge networks, equip participants to acquire new skills in order to think and strive towards a better world. It is meant to make a difference to the person as well as to the society, institution, or network she or he is a part of.

In the last few years, ActionAid has facilitated the coming together of groups working towards the development of ideology and striving to provide alternatives. While the pedagogue does cover reading and books, another important component is the development of a leader. The leaders who participate in the schools come from different community-based organizations, groups, mass organizations and their concepts vary quite a bit. One of the foremost things that are emphasized while picking up perspective leaders is their eagerness of asking questions or having a pattern of thinking, linkage with grassroots, experience, enthusiastic wish and an understanding to change themselves in order to involve in our ideology but these qualities are not mandatory since change is  possible on the base of experience.


Aims

The aim of the project is to assess the learning process adopted in the two schools that helps in nurturing leadership skills in women and men from the diverse sections of the society. Whereas the specific aim of the project is to assess the empowerment they observe in their lives and further investigate if participation in the schools helped them gain deeper understanding and perspectives on a range of theories and concepts related to poverty, patriarchy, justice, equality, human rights, politics, power, gender and democracy and enhanced participation in governance and larger advocacy. Further, the research focuses on the leaders of the marginalized communities as the subject and aims to understand the notion of empowerment from their perspective and aims to evolve a framework thereafter.

The SDG recognizes gender equality & women’s empowerment as integral to each of the 17 goals. It envisions an economy that works for all. It has been recognized that gender along with caste and class play an important role in the production relations. GPN recognizes that the fruits of development are distributed unevenly and it is more than often that the inclusion of marginalized communities is not ensured. Hence the aim of the project aligns with the vision of GPN that promotes the inclusion of subaltern communities in the process of development.


Scope

This study delves upon the former participants/students of the two schools contributing to self-empowerment and further empowering those belonging to the weakest constituent of the Indian social structure while advocating their socio-political rights. The present study is narrowed to capturing the impact of the leadership education and training on the people from the marginalized and excluded communities that had participated and is now working at the grassroot through assertion for socio-economic-political change and a push for democratic values and for upholding democratic culture.

Due to the scattered location of the former participants, the study will be to limited different participants of leadership schools and urban action schools across the country. The research will support further shaping the pedagogue and the capacity of participants asserting and securing rights through political participation and are active in different parts of the country.


Literature Review

The basic premise of Leadership school, if one looks at it from the lens of it being a form of New Institutionalism, is that institutions ‘matter’, an ‘argument that the organization of political life makes a difference’ (March and Olsen, 1984: 747). This approach has emerged as a reaction to the behavioural revolution of the 1960s, which viewed institutions as epiphenomenal, merely the sum of individual actions (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; Lowndes, 2010).  In a seminal article, March and Olsen (1984: 747) observed that in a world increasingly dominated by social, political, and economic institutions ‘what we observe in the world is inconsistent with the ways in which contemporary theorists ask us to talk’. Building on earlier institutional foundations in political science, these ‘new’ institutionalists attempted to move beyond the largely descriptive approach of ‘old’ institutionalism to unearth the formal and informal institutional rules which structure political behaviour (Lowndes, 2010).

Yet, there are various models of leadership schools or cadre schools in the contemporary world and considerable debate over ‘just what [it] is’ (Hall and Taylor, 1996: 936). Over the years, the Netritva Vicharshal, as a theoretical framework, has developed around four main approaches: rational choice institutionalism; historical institutionalism; organizational or sociological institutionalism; and, more recently, discursive or constructivist institutionalism. This diversity of perspectives has enabled this theory to be applied to the study of a wide range of political phenomena. Less positively, it has resulted in compartmentalization and fragmentation of institutionalist/political research (Crouch, 2003).

Building community leadership and institutional capacity has been an important process in the trajectory of the organisation. Recent work in the field of leadership development has moved towards more dynamic conceptions of institutional change, emphasizing the subtle and often gradual ways in which institutions evolve over time as a result of both exogenous and endogenous factors. Looking deeper into the notion of building people’s institution also involves shifting the focus to the dynamics of endogenous institutional change, highlighting the ways in which ‘institutions organically evolve (or are intentionally designed) through changing, introducing or manipulating institutional elements while supplementing existing elements (or responding to their failure to generate desired behavior)’ (Greif and Laitin, 2004: 640). Similarly, recent work by many authors has proposed a ‘realistic’ conception of political institutions, arguing that institutional change is generated as a result of ‘the normal, every- day implementation and enactment of an institution’ (Streeck and Thelen, 2005: 11).

Work in this area has introduced new and more gradual conceptions of change to the debate, such as layering, where some elements of existing institutions are renegotiated but other elements remain; conversion, in which existing institutions are redirected to new purposes; drift, in which institutional arrangements are actively neglected or coopted; and displacement, where existing rules are discredited in favour of new institutions or logics (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010; Schickler, 2001; Streeck and Thelen, 2005).


Methodology

Selection of Research Area (Former student/participant): The research will be based on a case study/life study/focussed group discussion method to ascertain the effectiveness of leadership schools and urban action schools, by conducting an empirical inquiry that investigates the notion of empowerment within its real-life context of the participants

Data sources: Largely primary data will be used for the purpose of this study with contextual use of secondary data. Primary data will be collected through conducting field visits, case studies, sampling by research scholars and organizing workshops with the young activists and grassroot workers including those belonging to marginalized communities.

Suitable tools and techniques will be used for assessing individual work and the notion of empowerment while observing the socio-political-economic climate surrounding them.

Sampling: A judgemental sample (activists and grassroot leaders) would be studied for this purpose. Two Focused Group Discussions (through workshops) would be conducted with individuals within the sample. One of the FGDs will be with the women activists and grassroot leaders, belonging particularly to the marginalized communities, and the other is proposed for young leaders from the Urban Action School.