management capacity often expands to include women, the poor, and other marginalized identity groups. That is, where marginalized groups use conflicts to generate dense, diverse, and organized collective action, they may also become more capable of exercising meaningful influence in conflict management forums. We explore conditions under which this may (or may not) be the case. A hallmark of this capacity is heightened associational contact between groups in formalized settings as well as a brand of highly discretionary and transaction intensive decision-making<sup>10</sup> , which lends itself to the formation of new, less rigidly bounded prescriptive identity groups.

The paper proceeds in five sections. Section One briefly reviews theories and evidence on conceptualizing empowerment in the context of local conflict. Section Two describes the particular challenges of measuring conflict management capacity and then describes the methodology for doing so in this study, using 72 case studies of local level conflict management in Indonesia. Section Three re-interprets key conceptual and empirical linkages between conflict management capacity and local level power by proposing an analytical framework for the comparative analysis of conflict pathways. Section 4 presents our analysis and results. Section 5 concludes.

# **1. Conceptualizing Empowerment: A Review of Theory and Evidence**

Reliable approaches for measuring empowerment must start from a firm conceptual grasp of which actions constitute different kinds of power within particular contexts. This section briefly synthesizes academic and operationally relevant thinking about capability, power, and conflict in development.

Since the publication of Sen’s _Development as Freedom_ , a growing tradition within development economics and the social sciences has come to recognize intrinsic as well as instrumental reasons for why and how capabilities matter to development interventions. Sen first popularized the notion that these intrinsic and practical reasons are deeply intertwined: the work of advancing people’s basic freedom of capability is simultaneously a means and end of development. Because poverty is a form of “unfreedom” characterized by powerlessness, it is both ethically disconcerting as well as functionally problematic for development institutions. The poor in some very practical sense lack the capabilities required to first develop their interests fully and then devise and choose between options for pursuing them.<sup>11</sup> Nussbaum further describes the related tendency of marginalized groups to form “adaptive preferences”, or narrow practical aspirations that shape how they conceive of their life possibilities.<sup>12</sup> Her theory demonstrates a key constraint within many popular notions of capability: they de-emphasize the social and cultural systems that shape and develop capabilities.

The study of empowerment stands to capably challenge this tendency toward methodological individualism where it carefully describes how these relational systems encourage and

> 10 Pritchett and Woolcock (2004)

> 11 Sen (1999)

> 12 Nussbaum’s (2000) concept of adaptive preferences has a longer intellectual history, though her work is most closely associated with it.

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