Measuring Empowerment in the Democratic Developmental State

Abstract

The state of Public and Development Management-related disciplines in
developing countries (and especially in Africa) could generally be improved by the adoption of more rigorous research topic selections, designs and methods of data collection, analysis and assessment. There is a need to move beyond a preoccupation with descriptive summaries of governmental outputs and the identifi cation of policy ‘challenges’, to an evidence-based evaluation of the results of governmental programmes in order to improve future policy decisions. This article investigates what is needed to evaluate empowerment
programmes in so-called democratic developmental states more  systematically.