Targeting empowerment in community development: a community psychology approach to enhancing local power and well-being

This article proposes psychological empowerment as an orientation and targeted outcome for community development efforts. Psychological empowerment has been the focus of many studies in community psychology, where it has been defined as the psychological aspects of processes through which people, organizations, and communities take greater control over their affairs. Psychological empowerment has been found to increase with greater levels of community participation, and to have protective mental health effects. Community and organizational processes that are psychologically empowering are promising as approaches to sustainably promote both subjective well-being and objective changes in local systems. The case is made in this article for more widespread use of empowerment theory, at multiple levels of analysis, in community development processes. Participatory development is viewed as a particularly promising approach for the promotion of psychological empowerment, yet more thorough consideration and assessment of psychological empowerment holds promise for achieving the full potential of participatory approaches. *Address for correspondence: Brian D. Christens, School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1300 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA; email: [email protected] & Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2012 All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/cdj/bss031 Advance Access publication 29 August 2012 538 Community Development Journal Vol 47 No 4 October 2012 pp. 538–554 Introduction: power and well-being A major premise of this article is that power should be central to discussions of global mental health and community development. Unfortunately, emerging conceptions of global mental health as a field (Patel and Prince, 2010) do not address issues of power, but instead focus exclusively on ‘scaling up’ services, including professional intervention and drug treatments, for those experiencing mental distress. While it is true that many services should be made more accessible to more people, the notion that professional mental health services could be scaled up to meet the needs of the world’s rapidly growing population is unrealistic, to say the very least. Mental health services and treatments are often costly, and many of the people who might benefit most from them lack access to resources needed to meet more basic and urgent needs and concerns, which, if addressed, might well have larger positive impacts on mental well-being. Even in wealthier societies, some observers have long recognized the impossibility of approaching mental health at a population level from the perspective of treatment and professional service provision. In 1976, Seymour Sarason wrote of his earlier realization that ‘[U.S.] society did not possess nor would it ever possess the professional resources to deal with troubled individuals. Put another way, as long as we define the problems of individuals in a way so as to require solution by highly trained professionals, the gap between “supply and demand” becomes scandalously greater with time’ (Sarason, 1976, p. 318). This realization led Sarason and community psychology, a field of study he helped to initiate, away from mental health services and treatments to a focus on promoting well-being and empowerment. Research in community psychology has discovered that positive psychological outcomes, such as well-being and resilience, are systemic and can have compounding effects (Prilleltensky, 2012). Psychosocial benefits accrue not only to those fortunate enough to avoid trauma and other risk factors, but also to those who become actively engaged in community organizations and other democratic processes. This is particularly true for those who become engaged in certain types of community and organizational settings – namely, those settings that have structures that permit many people to play meaningful roles, those that provide social support, those that provide access to social networks in different organizations, and those that implement community action (Peterson and Zimmerman, 2004). These empowering community settings can contribute simultaneously to individual psychological development, community development, and positive social change (Maton, 2008). That is to say, they can build power, resilience, and sociopolitical control at the psychological, organizational and Targeting empowerment in community development 539