Searching for the impact of empowerment

This report outlines findings from an Ipsos Social Research Institute study that attempts to assess the impact of empowerment on key outcomes. This has been done through re-analysing survey data from the New Deal for Communities (NDC) National Evaluation to explore the links between feelings of influence and actual involvement in NDC activities on wider perceptions of satisfaction with the local area, quality of life, feelings of community and trust.

The government is increasingly focusing on encouraging the empowerment of citizens as a way of improving the design and delivery of public services, developing and strengthening social capital or community cohesion and encouraging civic renewal . This is reinforced in the Community Empowerment White Paper which builds on measures already in place from other recent pieces of legislation.

While there is a clear push from the government towards increasing community empowerment, the extent to which people want this is far less clear cut . The evidence suggests a spectrum of interest, with only a very small minority at one end who want to be actively involved, a larger minority at the other end who have no interest at all, with most in the middle . It does seem that there is a significant proportion who want more of a say, but this needs to be in a variety of ways, not just through traditional governance mechanisms like public meetings and resident boards .

A programme of approaches needs to developed, which could mirror the way social marketing targets different communication strategies on different segments of the population depending on their characteristics, behaviours and preferences .

Given the policy focus on empowerment and its range of possible benefits, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to point to solid evidence linking increased empowerment to improved outcomes on key measures . Indeed, there is a clear call by practitioners and policy makers for evidence-based guidance about what works and what doesn’t in order to target (increasingly scarce) resources as effectively as possible.

While there are a number of reviews of individual case studies that attempt to look at the impact of empowerment, these tend to be qualitative in nature and provide only an “impressionistic” view . This is partly because it is very difficult to provide definitive proof, for a number of reasons: there is a lack of clarity about what is meant by empowerment, partly because it is still an emerging area that covers a diverse range of policy areas; the key outcomes are also difficult to measure; and definitively attributing cause and effect is just about impossible with the information available . This reflects a wider issue with evidence-based public policy making, where association is often taken as cause; as in many areas of policy, we need more experimental designs and more imaginative linking of different data sources to really understand the impact of empowerment .