Welfare models and approaches to empowerment: Competing perspectives from area regeneration programmes1

Abstract

Paternalism has been the focus of critiques of the Welfare State in recent years, both from the New Right, and from sections of the Left. Far from representing an enhanced dimension of citizenship (as T. H. Marshall had anticipated) state welfare has been characterised as the ‘nanny state’, undermining individual rights and autonomy, in terms of reinforcing passive rather than active citizenship. In response to New Right strategies for rolling back the state, the Left has been prompted to propose its own solutions for combating bureaucratic and professional paternalism, including strategies to improve the quality of services, working in partnership with service users as well as providers, emphasising ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’. These terms had also emerged in New Right discourse, however. Far from necessarily representing any new consensus, then, the concepts of participation and empowerment have been problematic and contested. The research upon which this article is based set out to explore these differing and contested meanings of empowerment, in the context of area regeneration programmes that aimed to promote it. On the basis of interviews with participants, themselves, three different definitions of empowerment were identified. Empowerment was defined in terms of gaining the information, knowledge and skills necessary for effective consultation, and, more amply, it was defined as acquiring the ability to define priorities and set agendas, including, in the fullest version, wider agendas for social change. Although these three definitions had varying policy implications, however, participants’ perspectives on empowerment were not so readily classifiable, in terms of Right/Left political perspectives. The article concludes by exploring the relevance of two‐dimensional models of social welfare, as a means of capturing the variations within as well as between Left and Right perspectives on Welfare State paternalism and user/community empowerment.