Policing empowerment: The making of capable subjects

This article analyses the attempts to promote economic and social developme nt in the Third World through techniques of empowerment and participation. Based on Michel Foucault's analytics of government - notably the notion of self-technologies - we analyse two empowerment projects for women. We argue , first, that empowerment projects seek to constitute beneficiaries as acti ve and responsible individuals with the ability to take charge of their own lives. Thus, empowerment should be viewed not as a transfer of power to in dividuals who formerly possessed little or no power, but as a technology se eking to create self-governing and responsible individuals, i.e. modern cit izens in the western liberal sense. Second, through the intertwinement of a nthropological knowledges and radical action research, knowledge about the local has become an authoritative mode of veridiction (regime of truth) in development interventions. By seeking to instigate and activate 'local know ledges', participatory development interventions entail a crucial recasting of the governing of the target population who are now supposed - on the ba sis of rational decision-making, such as cost-benefit analysis - to freely join the power-loaded game of the active citizen. Third and finally it is a lso maintained that the role of the developer on the subjective involvement of the individual developer, the participatory approaches recast developme nt as an art form that puts at stake the ethical practices of 'facilitators ' and beneficiaries alike.