scholarly journals Deepa Narayan (ed.). Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Washington, D.C.: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank, 2005. Pages xx+475. Paperback. Price not given.

2004 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-301
Author(s):  
Faheem Jehangir Khan

‘Empowerment’ has different meanings in different sociocultural and political contexts, and does not translate easily into all languages. Choosing indicators for measuring empowerment, therefore, depends on the social, economic, political, and cultural environment of the target population, and this multi-dimensional nature of empowerment complicates issues of measurement. This book brings forth the different indicators of empowerment in a cross-disciplinary perspective, underlining the challenge of evaluating empowerment and its contribution to development effectiveness and outcome.

2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (No. 2) ◽  
pp. 57-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Lošťák

In relation to sustainable rural development, the paper starts with the question of its conditions. One of them is social acceptance of various projects or programmes. This issue is joined with the co-ordination of human activities. The mechanism facilitating the co-ordination in contemporary societies is related to social capital. Its concept is outlined through the references to the basic literature about the topic. Using content analysis, based on the quantification of the categories created through the analysis of the literature about the topic, the social capital in selected municipalities is investigated. The main aim of the paper, however, is to show the role of this method in social capital fast identification. Although the approach necessitates further elaboration, it can be considered as the first important step in the practice of development activities. The background of the paper reflects the challenges of the World Bank concerning the elaboration and development of the new methods of measuring social capital.


Author(s):  
Jane Jenson

In the mid-1990s, the practice of international organizations began to cohere around the social investment perspective, with strategies that were child-centred and advocated human capital investments for economic growth and social development. This chapter examines the World Bank, which endorsed the policy instrument of conditional cash transfers (CCT) to allow very poor families to invest in children’s health and education—a stock-plus-buffer strategy. Then it scans the OECD, which recommended early childhood education to ensure human capital development and the labour-market activation of parents—a stock-plus-flow strategy. Both organizations developed anti-poverty positions with attention to the intergenerational transfer of disadvantage and investments in human capital. This similarity has declined in recent years, as the World Bank incorporated the social investment perspective into its new inclusive growth frame, while the OECD turned its attention to problems of inequality rather than poverty and thereby associated itself less with the social investment perspective.


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