Discussion Paper No. 135 Community Empowerment by NGOs - Experience from the Fourth Fisheries Project in Bangladesh Kazi Ali Toufique * December 2005 Graduate School of Ingernational Development NAGOYA UNIVERSITY NAGOYA 464-8601, JAPAN 〒464-8601 名古屋市千種区不老町 名古屋大学大学院国際開発研究科 * Senior Research Fellow, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies E 17 Agargaon, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Dhaka 1207, Bangladesh Email:
[email protected] Research Fellow, Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University, from December 2004 till March 2005. It is clear that local elites are quite capable of capturing the process and benefits of whatever technological or policy changes that come along. Yet, the literature on local management generally has ignored the issue of power. This is potentially a serious oversight. If authority over a resource system is transferred to the community level, local elites are positioned to turn this to their advantage, and in the process simply strengthen. The end result, in all likelihood, would not be the sort of equitable development considered an almost natural consequence of community-based management Davis and Bailey (1996, pp. 262-3) 1. INTRODUCTION Community-based development requires empowering of the community. Empowerment is a condition and goal of co-management (Jentoft 2005). Although, the concept of community is generally believed to be complex and open to different interpretations (Agarwal and Gibson 1998, Davis and Bailey 1996), in a more heuristic sense it involves at least two types of actors: the poor and the non-poor1. The non-poor, or a section of them, are generally powerful social actors and referred to as “rural elites”. They frequently capture or dominate community institutions that can play an instrumental role in shaping the livelihoods of the poor (Platteau 2004).