helpful to separate the study of the empowerment attitude outcomes (sometimes called “psychological empowerment” or “subjective empowerment”) from the empowerment behavioral outcomes (e.g. starting or expanding a business or negotiating expenditure decisions). Instead, both should be surveyed. In addition, the paper also suggests that experimental evaluation research on women’s economic empowerment might benefit from studying the links with empowerment outcomes in other domains. This might yield insights into the most effective interventions to achieve both economic empowerment and broader empowerment goals.

# **2. The concept of empowerment**

The concept of empowerment is now widely used in a number of disciplines to characterize states and social processes of individuals and communities. It is broadly defined as _power_ (control over one’s own life and over resources) _and agency_ (capability to originate and direct actions for given purposes). According to Wikipedia, the term originated in community psychology; in this case it refers to “measures designed to increase the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people and in communities in order to enable them to represent their interests in a responsible and self-determined way, acting on their own authority”.<sup>1</sup> From this point of view, empowerment is both a collective process and an outcome. In the literature of individual psychology and human development, it is a set of characteristics that is acquired as part of the transition to adulthood (Zimmerman and Cleary 2006). In the management literature, empowerment is an approach to influence employee behavior – it means to provide employees with resources, knowledge, and decision-making power so they can take decisions that improve business performance; in other words, a particularly effective delegation.<sup>2</sup> In the gender and economics literature (which primarily focuses on women’s welfare), both the individual and the community aspects of empowerment are recognized. In a one-sentence definition, Kabeer (2012) characterizes it as: “ _the processes through which women gained the capacity for exercising strategic forms of agency in relation to their own lives as well as in relation to the larger structures of constraint that positioned them as subordinate to men_ ”.<sup>3</sup> This definition reflects both the attitudes and behaviors of individual women as well as the capacity of a community of women to organize and act collectively. Others add to this the characteristics of the systems by which societies regulate individual and group behaviors – laws, norms, and customs (or in shorthand, the institutions). For example, the UN defines women’s empowerment as “ _women’s sense of self-worth; their right to have and determine choices; their right to have access to opportunities and resources; their right to have the power to control their own lives, both within and outside the home; and their ability to influence the direction of social change to create a more just social and economic order, nationally and internationally._ ”<sup>4</sup>

> 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empowerment

> 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empowerment

> 3 Kabeer 2012, p. 7.

> 4 Cited in Kabeer, 2012. Narayan-Parker (2002) also incorporated the relationships between the individuals and society’s institutions.

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