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SEMINAR 2001 |
THE ARKLETON TRUST
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[CONTENTS] [NEXT PAGE] |
3: Powera: disempowerment/empowermentWhen looking at power in terms of community development, we need to be aware of structures of power, positions of power, and mechanisms of power - all of which have an impact on the constitution of development initiatives and which constrain or channel the ways in which they help a community move from disempowerment to empowerment. In a way, this could be seen as yet another context to be considered.
Power can be defined as the ability to influence decisions. It is expressed across multiple levels of society and needs to be countered the same way. Often, the models and visions of powerful politicians have disempowered rural people, whether these are models of big-scale rural development or more basic industrial values such as 'bigger is better'. Post-war planning for North Norway, which sought and failed to develop 'growth-poles' as an alternative to scattered settlement patterns which people wanted, was one example among many [2] (see Brox, 1982). In this way, the intellectual and cognitive models of powerful people or powerful external communities exert an undue influence on the lives of rural people. One approach is to try to build viable models which are attractive to policy makers whilst still assuring, as much as is possible, positive outcomes for the communities with which we are actual concerned. In the discussions of 'disempowerment' we moved very quickly to means of empowerment. It seemed there was a consensus that the former is well studied but the latter much less so, and should therefore be an important focus for our work and for the 2003 conference. It is salutary that our concerns were with how to facilitate empowerment, rather than stalled at the barriers to it.
[2] See Ottar Brox's 1982 paper on 'Five Attempts at Planning the Development of North Norway'. Forthcoming in Brox (2002) Essays and Papers on the Political Economy of Development in the North Atlantic Periphery.
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