Development Through Empowerment: Delivering Effective Public Services - A Literature Review

This paper reviews the channels through which empowerment may improve the efficiency and quality of public service delivery, particularly in developing Asia. Departing from a macro perspective, we focus and revisit microeconomic evidence for three broad measures aimed at empowering the poor: empowerment through voice, empowerment through exit, and empowerment through information

Empowerment in the Public Sector: Testing the Influence of Goal Orientation

Empowerment has emerged as an important new issue in the public sector organization setting in the wake of mainstream new public management (NPM). Nevertheless, few studies in this frame have combined structural (managerial) and psychological (individual) approaches in an integrative study of empowerment. There is also a need to examine the moderating variables involved in this relationship, as well as to extend research on work motivation in public management. This study explores the effect of structural empowerment on psychological empowerment, and it also draws on goal orientation (GO) theory to examine the moderating role of employees’ GO in this link. The model is tested on a sample of 521 Spanish local authority employees. The results do not confirm the direct link between structural and psychological empowerment, but show that learning GO has considerable moderating power in this relationship, and its interaction with structural empowerment affects employees’ psychological empowerment levels

Re-thinking technology and its growing role in enabling patient empowerment

© The Author(s) 2018. The presence and increase of challenges to eHealth in today’s society have begun to generate doubts about the capability of technology in patient empowerment, especially within the frameworks supporting empowerment. Through the review of existing frameworks and articulation of patient demands, weaknesses in the current application of technology to support empowerment are explored, and key constituents of a technology-driven framework for patient empowerment are determined. This article argues that existing usage of technology in the design, development and implementation of patient empowerment in the healthcare system, although well intentioned, is insufficiently constituted, primarily as a result of fragmentation. Systems theory concepts such as holism and iteration are considered vital in improving the role of technology in enabling patient empowerment

Conceptualizing pathways linking women's empowerment and prematurity in developing countries.

BackgroundGlobally, prematurity is the leading cause of death in children under the age of 5. Many efforts have focused on clinical approaches to improve the survival of premature babies. There is a need, however, to explore psychosocial, sociocultural, economic, and other factors as potential mechanisms to reduce the burden of prematurity. Women's empowerment may be a catalyst for moving the needle in this direction. The goal of this paper is to examine links between women's empowerment and prematurity in developing settings. We propose a conceptual model that shows pathways by which women's empowerment can affect prematurity and review and summarize the literature supporting the relationships we posit. We also suggest future directions for research on women's empowerment and prematurity.MethodsThe key words we used for empowerment in the search were "empowerment," "women's status," "autonomy," and "decision-making," and for prematurity we used "preterm," "premature," and "prematurity." We did not use date, language, and regional restrictions. The search was done in PubMed, Population Information Online (POPLINE), and Web of Science. We selected intervening factors-factors that could potentially mediate the relationship between empowerment and prematurity-based on reviews of the risk factors and interventions to address prematurity and the determinants of those factors.ResultsThere is limited evidence supporting a direct link between women's empowerment and prematurity. However, there is evidence linking several dimensions of empowerment to factors known to be associated with prematurity and outcomes for premature babies. Our review of the literature shows that women's empowerment may reduce prematurity by (1) preventing early marriage and promoting family planning, which will delay age at first pregnancy and increase interpregnancy intervals; (2) improving women's nutritional status; (3) reducing domestic violence and other stressors to improve psychological health; and (4) improving access to and receipt of recommended health services during pregnancy and delivery to help prevent prematurity and improve survival of premature babies.ConclusionsWomen's empowerment is an important distal factor that affects prematurity through several intervening factors. Improving women's empowerment will help prevent prematurity and improve survival of preterm babies. Research to empirically show the links between women's empowerment and prematurity is however needed

Perception of the FATA residents regarding the implementation of the FCR reforms

"The 2011 political reforms included numerous and extensive amendments to the Frontier Crimes Regulation. The legal concepts and overarching structure of the regulation, however, remained essentially untouched. While most critics and many FATA citizens argue that additional political reforms are needed, the 2011 amendments to the FCR did introduce new concepts, strengthened pre-existing substantive and procedural law, and made some gains in terms of the political and human rights of FATA citizens. The main purpose of the research was to understand gaps in the current FCR Reforms and present community determined changes to the Reforms.

Relocating empowerment as a management concept for Asia

Management theories, especially those in the area of human resource management, are predominantly Western-centric in origin and in the empirical testing that underpins them. The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions of one such theory, employee empowerment, in an Asian context. Information gathered from an open ended questionnaire and focus groups provide an in-depth examination of hotel managers' perceptions and practice of empowerment in the workplace. This study provides tentative indicators of significant culturally-driven differences in the understanding and application of employee empowerment (in terms of both research and practice) between Western and Asian contexts. The results of this study indicate that empowerment in Asian cultures relates much more to the individual and his/her merits, in contrast to organizationally-driven empowerment in Western countries. The findings also indicate that empowerment by hotel managers is related to the level of personal trust the manager has in an employee

Empowerment through residence

What does it mean to empower people through the housing in which they live, and how is this empowerment to be achieved? These are the questions which are examined in this paper. Typologies of empowerment processes are devised in an attempt to make sense of the conceptual and empirical variety involved. The distinction between 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' empowerment orientations is argued to be particularly important for understanding the content, pattern and general direction of empowerment processes. Empowerments through knowledge, statute, resources, agreement and specific power transfer are then discussed in relation to specific housing contexts, in particular the context of social housing management. The utility of the typologies of empowerment processes is tested in application to specific tenant participation arrangements. It is concluded that resident empowerment is worth pursuing not only for its own sake, but for the benefits which it can bring to a wider society