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Power structures that stand between women and the state
Click here to see full version of WEMC research framework: 'Women empowering themselves: A framework that interrogates and transforms'.
 
 
 
 
Women's empowerment is increasingly acknowledged as essential for reducing poverty and accelerating economic growth. WEMC understands 'empowerment' as an increased capacity to make autonomous decisions that transform unfavourable power relations. Women's empowerment eludes conventional interventions because these ignore power structures that stand between women and state institutions. To address this gap, we focus on informal power structures, especially those located at the meso level, because such forces shape the gender systems within which women's empowerment necessarily occurs.

 
 

The autonomy of many women is obstructed by particular power structures within which they are located. National policies and programmes that are supportive of women's empowerment - such as those related to the 'Beijing Platform for Action', the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - are ineffective when their implementation is blocked by power structures that stand between women and state institutions.

The WEMC research framework points out crucial differences between power structures - between formal and informal power structures, and between those located at the macro level and those located at meso and micro levels. These differences pertain to their institutionalisation, visibility and purview. Because it is assumed that the macro encapsulates the meso and micro (such as provinces, districts, villages and households), it is also assumed that there is no need to pay attention to power dynamics occurring at the meso level. The assumed logic is that once governance at the macro level is sound, lower levels of governance would automatically follow suit. Realities increasingly indicate the falsity of such assumptions.

   
  To address such misconceptions, WEMC focuses on meso-level and micro-level forces that are operating on the ground, including contestations between formal and informal power structures and the impact of such contestations on the lived realities within which women's empowerment or disempowerment occurs. Through this focus, WEMC research breaks new ground by tracking:  
 
‧ How policies unavoidably filter through meso-level dynamics before reaching women
‧ How women's actions interact with meso-level structures, and with what policy implications
 
   
  Real-world processes of empowerment and disempowerment
WEMC research veers away from conventional development discourse that merely measures empowerment while completely ignoring real-world power structures and power relations that impact on women. Instead, the WEMC programme is concerned with processes of empowerment and disempowerment as the fluctuating dynamics of ongoing power contestations. WEMC asserts that women's relative lack of power stems not from their lack of education, health or other skills and assets, but from processes of disempowerment visited upon them by the power structures within which they are located.

Development interventions that effectively reduce inequities undoubtedly enhance conditions under which it may become more likely for women to assert their rights. But by itself, the amelioration of the conditions of women's lives merely reshapes the milieu within which existing power relations are played out. It does not change existing relations of power or bring about women's empowerment per se. Contrary to much of development discourse that regards such domains as employment, education or health as the focus of women's empowerment, WEMC research views these domains merely as the landscape where women's empowerment takes place, rather than as achievements of empowerment.

The programme emphasises women's indigenous strategies for empowerment that have been largely undocumented, including individual and collective struggles. The diagram below shows the empowerment processes at individual, collective, organised, institutional levels that WEMC research is studying:


Scale of women's empowerment from individual to institutionalised
The WEMC programme maps where, when, how and why individual actions translate into collective efforts, then become organised and institutionalised, or else fail to do so, as the case may be.
 
   
  Operationalising the WEMC research framework
To operationalise this conceptual framework, the WEMC programme focuses on women's empowerment and disempowerment in four thematic areas: 		 
 
  • Theme 1: Women's views and analyses of power, disempowerment, empowerment
  • Theme 2: Women engaging in contestations of power around mechanisms of control used by disempowering forces
  • Theme 3: Women's strategies for empowerment and the support they mobilise
  • Theme 4: Outcomes of women's initiatives for empowerment