Ethics of Community Empowerment

Nowadays the term empowerment is used to indicate a wide range of activities, including housing projects, feeding schemes, education, social upliftment, to name a few. However, many such skills-focused programs have encountered similar problems concerning obtaining community involvement, and ensuring that communities will sustain such projects.

In this context, authors Neil Orr and David Patient explore how communication can be used as a strategy for overcoming stigma and apathy in order to motivate communities to participate in, and sustain, community projects. While acknowledging that each community is unique, they seek in this 8-page paper to articulate a common set of values - an ethical framework - for guiding efforts to empower others in the long term.

Orr and Patient start by challenging the notion that there is a stable and cohesive "traditional culture" in the developing world. Instead, based on such advances as information and communication technologies (ICTs), "the existing cultures are in reality transitional, with elements of old and new traditions and norms merging, often conflicting." For this reason, context is key; development workers cannot "simply enter a community, transfer the apparently 'missing' skill or resource, and walk away, job well done." The authors offer the following considerations to development workers or programme planners concerned with community empowerment:

1. The fundamental need for an identity - Ask community members what they really want, and what their primary values and sense of identity are.
2. The strength of the conscious value and appreciation of life itself - "It is often a shock for many people to discover how little they truly value their lives, and this is the beginning of the process of change for many. Part of this process is awareness of the value of 'I', plus awareness that 'we' are necessary in order to proceed to create the future I and we desire, despite differences."
3. The presence (or absence) of the community's desire for a potential future where specific desires and needs are met, and values respected - "When environmental factors change, it is often very difficult to individually or collectively 'dream' of future situations that deviate from traditional ways of being. Instead, a sense of hopelessness sets in..." Methods for resurrecting a desirable future are rooted in a hybrid mixture of traditional rituals and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).
4. Resources - Before addressing 1-3 above, practitioners need to carry out "a detailed factual analysis of the resources available to the specific community". These resources depend on what the community has stated it wants and needs, but might include access to water, food, education, medical services, and basic amenities. The next step is to ensure that the resources are situated "within a psychosocial vessel of values, goals and identity."

The authors argue that those who seek to empower communities by taking into account the above considerations must be attuned to the fact that "there is no such thing as objectivity. It is a physical and psychosocial impossibility." What they term the ethic of relationship relies centrally on the recognition that each person (e.g., a development worker) engages in a situation (e.g., an effort to empower a community) with a personal history and set of preferences, as well as a particular cultural paradigm. This observation is related to the following question: "when we deal with communities with a different world-view, how can we tell the difference between interfering and empowering?" To respond, the authors offer several ethical guidelines for protecting the dignity and choice of those one seeks to empower:

1. Seek to increase conscious choice - Facilitate conscious awareness of choice, and then honour and protect the conscious choices made by others.
2. Respect another's map of the world - Each person has a particular way of seeing the world, or a "paradigm". Seek to understand and respect the other person's (or group's) map of the world.
3. Keep in mind that people are doing the best they know how, with the resources they have available - If "resources" includes internal beliefs, feelings, and resources (confidence, feeling safe, loved, etc), the idea is that one seek "to uncover what resources led to the behaviour, and therefore the possibility of changing behaviour through modification of resources."
4. Remember that people are not their behaviours - "This means that we do not seek to judge who people are. Instead, we seek to facilitate changes in what they do, if they choose to change."
5. Sustain empowerment - "It is important to always consider the whole person or community - what are the consequences? It is sometimes necessary to step out of our map of the world, examine the situation from their map of the world, and seek ways to empower that work for them, with due consideration of the consequences."
6. Examine the results of one's efforts, and adjust what needs to be adjusted, and carry on - View negative results as feedback (information about how one is doing in the process); "there is no such thing as failure, only 'incomplete success'."
7. Be willing to be flexible - "If you communicate, then the response (or lack thereof) is simply a reflection of your communication. If you communicate differently,
   you will get different results. Examine their map of the world again...You cannot expect people to change, when you are not willing to consider changing yourself, and the way you communicate."

The authors close by raising a question central to the ethics of empowerment: "What is the 'right' thing to do when the values and choices of one person (or group) conflict with another person's (or group)?" They suggest that participants first ask whether the ethic in question "contain[s] the scope of meaning that is required for us to live with dignity, and does it serve our relationships?" Next, participants might together explore "what the ethics imply", then "debate, discuss, and interpret, collectively", and, finally, "form agreements of what the ethic means."