Abstract

SANCHEZ-VIDAL, Alipio. Empowerment, liberation and human development. Psychosocial Intervention [online]. 2017, vol.26, n.3, pp.155-163. ISSN 2173-4712.  https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psi.2017.05.001.

The multiplication of studies on empowerment in psychosocial action indicates the importance and potential of the concept but also its limits: subjective-individual focus, negative view of power and self-complacency justification. In this article, we reassess psychosocial empowerment, outlining a positive and constructive vision (based on the expressed criticisms) of the power for human development. The partiality of relational conceptions of power require adding its structural and social-functional measures, recognizing three inclusive foci of empowerment (personnel, interactive, social) and the complementarity of community and organisational-institutional empowerment for personal and social development. We explore power as an instrumental value (for social justice and human development), whose exercise entails responsibility. We expose the problems of the controversial empowerment models that propose liberation, redistributing a power that is assumed to be scarce and aimed at domination. We propose a resource model that assumes that power is unlimited and can be shared and postulates cooperation to achieve human development involving two types of power: personal power (endogenous), which makes up the individual; and enabling (exogenous), which, through interaction and the environment, provides the affective, psychosocial, social-political and economic resources that nourish human development.

Keywords : Power; Empowerment; Domination; Liberation; Human development.

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