The project provides an empirical account of how actors and institutions involved in international development manage an agenda that ostensibly advocates for a redistribution of power from the powerful to the powerless. The operationalization of “empowerment” in the field of health promotion will serve as a case study. The empowerment agenda that entered health promotion in the 1990s theoretically encouraged health promoters to focus on structural inequities that created poor health and facilitate critical consciousness among client communities. Now that empowerment is a mainstay of health promotion interventions, how has this agenda been operationalized? We will conduct semi-structured qualitative interviews with professionals engaged with promoting health around the world and in a variety of capacities (program planner versus field-based implementer) and institutions (governmental, non-governmental, and multilateral). This research builds on theorizing in anthropology that views field-based, empirical descriptions of development activities as central to understanding development. Researching how empowerment has been operationalized in the field of health promotion is significant as it is one of the few instances where a redistributive agenda has been mainstreamed within development. It provides a rare case study of how the everyday actions of development professionals can temper or promote a redistributive agenda.
