Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4.1). More recently, empowerment is seen as a wider process
for facilitating self-reliance, well-being, political action and engage-
ment in civil society at a range of spatial scales. Transformations in
ICT, such as the Internet, have assisted the mobilization of virtual glo-
bal communities to share experiences and advocate for change (see
Chapter 3.4). Yet decades of policies aimed at empowering vulnerable
communities, particularly in gender mainstreaming, have not really
transformed power relations. Critics argue that empowerment can be
just another form of 'managed intervention' in a neoliberal era where
global structural inequalities remain stable (Lewis, 2002) (see Section 1).
To address its fundamental aims, empowerment needs to do more than
just 'invite' marginalized communities to participate (McEwan, 2005),
it needs help them 'acquire' the skills and assets needed to 'reclaim'
their own spaces and actively engage in strategies that fundamentally
challenge inequitable global relations (Cornwall, 2002). In order to help
communities reclaim political and economic space, attention has also
been paid to understanding the role of social relationships and net-
works in engendering participation.
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Understanding Social Relationships and
Social Capital in Development
The rise and fall of social capital as a panacea for development tells an
interesting story about the ways in which theoretical paradigms
become quickly absorbed into policy and praxis without critical reflec-
tion. Social capital was one of the most popular development concepts
of the 1990s, and it was universally embraced by development agencies
and practitioners working with communities in both the global South
and North. Social capital is a rather ambiguous and intangible concept
that refers to the rules, norms, obligations, reciprocity and trust embed-
ded in social relations, social structures and society's institutional
arrangements which enable its members to achieve their individual
and community objectives. Social networks encompass a diverse set of
relationships and associations around a shared set of values or inter-
ests that may include: kinship or neighbourhood based groups; migrant
networks; gender, political or religious based networks; or savings or
worker related movements. The popularity of social capital can largely
be attributed to Robert Putnam's (1993) study of regional government
