Community Empowerment Evidence

The Local Governance Research Unit at De Montfort University together with the Centre for Citizenship and Democracy (University of Southampton) are in the process of undertaking a systematic review of the international evidence based around “community empowerment”.

This comprehensive piece of work, Commissioned by the DCLG, already has some early findings.  Based on the popular U.K. definition for empowerment as an “increasing feeling of being able to influence decisions”, an abstract of the interim report relating to eParticipation is given below:-

• The links between eParticipation and community empowerment are surprisingly weak
• eParticipation is most successful in relation to the empowerment of individual participants
• eParticipation is notably less effective in empowering the wider community
• In order for eParticipation mechanisms to have any empowerment impact, the mechanism needs to be concerned with a highly salient issue
• Official sponsorship of eParticipation does not appear to play an important role in affecting empowerment outcomes

While many of the points are not news for experienced practitioners, the aforementioned process of mapping and defining empowerment success in the report is both competent and intriguing.  I find the last point particularly troublesome and duly welcome thoughts on this from others in the PEP-NET community.