Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the radical human-centred political projects of Liberation Theology and Critical Pedagogy in Latin America, this paper critiques the understanding of empowerment that underpins the Human Development practices implemented in the region in recent decades based on the work of Amartya Sen.

Paper long abstract:

Globally, but in Latin America in particular, the mushrooming of participatory practices of democracy and entrepreneurial projects of development has accompanied the consolidation of the Human Development (HD) paradigm, in shifting the locus of development to the individual. Welcomed as a quasi-revolutionary project that opened a long overdue space for the 'voiceless and the powerless', the HD discourse framed in the work of Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom (1990), has become the backbone of the mainstream development practices implemented in Latin America throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Even when in the last decade many political projects attempt to challenge these ideas, the work of international agencies and some of the national governments in the region remains tied to the HD perspective. The promotion of the individual's political and economic empowerment within participatory practices of democracy has, however, an antecedent in the radical Latin American political projects of the 60s-70s. With a central focus on the role of the individual in achieving socio-economic emancipation, Liberation Theology (e.g. Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff) and Critical Pedagogy (e.g. Paulo Freire) present several convergences with and challenges to HD and the work of Sen in particular. This paper theoretically critiques the latter's conception of human empowerment from the perspective of those radical human-centred projects of liberation. By bringing together two sets of literature this paper will explore the limits of the potential of mainstream development practices of empowerment to effectively achieve Development as freedom for the individual, and thus, its emancipation.