Community Development

Most have treated empowerment at the community level in vague terms. Scholars in community development and health promotion have identified domains of community empowerment, but these were designed for—and are infrequently used beyond—programmatic contexts. Others have drawn in concepts from social movement studies and sociological work on neighborhood social processes to understand community empowerment, yet these frameworks have not been linked to community power structure or to psychological or organizational empowerment processes. Chapter 6 therefore constructs a new conceptual framework for community empowerment. The intent is to bring empowerment theory closer to being able to realize its fundamental goals of acting as an integrated orientation for action and an infrastructure for systematic research.