Author Claudia Shifton writes about empowerment in the Community Development Journal and her main points are summarized in the Human Rights Reader. She offers a rough taxonomy of what to look for in the well established community development approaches of Service Delivery, Capacity Building, Advocacy and Social Mobilization when assessing the degree to which they (can) really empower people. Here's an exerpt of her take on empowerment in "service delivery":

"Service delivery can be characterised as the approach to community development that addresses actions directly related to immediate causes of maldevelopment; it provides a usually structured set of services to defined beneficiaries. Service delivery is most often sectoral, e.g. health, education, agriculture, other -and per-se tends not to be very sustainable."

In the delivery of services, empowering means, or is, or are actions that tend towards:

• Providing services in a gender sensitive + culture sensitive way.
• Using existing local human resources whenever possible.
• Most people in the community understand the rationale behind the services being offered.
• Community representatives participate in making decisions about the services being delivered.
• Training of staff is mostly competence-based, in-service, aimed at behavioural change and followed by regular support supervision.
• People cease to be passive receipients of services delivered by government and others; they demand a role of responsibility for themselves, especially in determining the type, quality, quantity, place and focus of such services; they take part in both the decision-making process and in the delivery mechanisms.
• Assuring a continuous flow of information between the providers and the end users of services enabling the latter to be equal partners in the planning, delivery, management and evaluation of those services.

Read more about how she frames empowerment in Capacity Building, Advocacy and Social Mobilization HERE>>