Toward a New Perspective of NGO's “Empowerment” Strategy

A Case Study of Autonomy Creation among Villagers' Groups in Bangladesh

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the situation that spurs people into spontaneous participation of development NGOs' “empowerment” strategies. Most NGOs, involved in development activities with the objective to eradicate poverty, emphasize self-reliance through self help activities. According to David Korten, through their information service, NGOs create awareness among the people about how they are deprived by local elites. Korten argues that this awareness helps people to realize that their reliance on the elites could be the main cause of their poverty, and as a result they become more receptive to self-help actions.
However, whether information from NGOs actually leads to self-help movements by the people for the betterment of their lives remains a doubt. Taking the case in a Bangladeshi village for instance, the local NGO was found to replace the elites as patrons in the villagers' eyes by merit of the information service that they provided. As a result, autonomous action was rejected by the villagers.
The Bangladeshi case demonstrates that NGOs' information services do not always lead to autonomous actions by self-help groups. If so, what then was the cause of autonomous actions? Taking James Scott's “the arts of resistance” as an analytical perspective, our study finds that while cracking cynical jokes with NGO staff about the conduct of the elites, members of the local selfhelp group gradually came to realize that they could only rely on themselves to solve their poverty problems and stopped regarding the NGO as their patron. By using their knowledge gained partly from the NGO about the elites' conducts, group members were able to represent the elites in jokes with NGO staff. Such activities eventually led the group members to take up autonomous actions.