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This introductory article draws out some of the dimensions and dilemmas around women's empowerment that are highlighted in the articles in this IDS Bulletin: the choices, the negotiations, the narratives and above all, the context of women's lived experience. In doing so, we show that empowerment is a complex process that requires more than the quick and easy solutions often offered by development agencies. Much of the significant change happening in women's lives takes place outside of the range of these conventional interventions. In conclusion, we suggest that for development agencies to really support women's empowerment requires greater engagement with changing structures rather than accommodating women within the inequitable existing order, and a much deeper understanding of what makes change happen in their lives.

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How and under what conditions does citizen-led social and political action contribute to empowerment and accountability? What are the strategies used, and with what outcomes, especially in settings which are democratically weak, politically fragile and affected by legacies of violence and conflict? The A4EA programme has explored these questions in Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria and Pakistan over five years between 2016-2021. This paper presents the key findings and policy and practice implications from this research across the themes of space for citizen action; citizen-governance relations; women’s political participation and collective action; citizen-led strategies for empowerment and accountability; and enabling citizen action. It also shares important lessons drawn from A4EA experience on conducting and communicating research in complex political contexts like these, and for research consortia. Whilst the research conclusions are drawn from A4EA’s four focus countries, in an increasingly fragile and authoritarian world, the findings are becoming pertinent for more and more contexts across the globe.

Many universities have graduate attributes, sometimes referred to as generic skills, soft skills or work ready skills. This paper reports a study of the professional work experiences of recent Australian Information Technology (IT) graduates who identified that communication, time management, teamwork, working with people, working across cultures, project management and business skills were some of the major professional skills required for their work. A discussion of the study and its findings raises questions about the adequacy of the graduate attributes approach in the development of professional skills such as the ability of to work across cultures and on multiple projects which are major requirements of graduates in many IT (and other) workplaces. The study reveals the IT graduates' perspectives on the challenges they faced at work, the typical professional skills requirements of their practice and how they acquired or developed them, the elements of their university study which had relevance to the required workplace professional skills and how well their studies prepared them to meet the professional needs of their practice.

Christensen's Theory of Disruptive Technologies predicts that mainstream organisations and industries can be made obsolete by new technologies that change the whole paradigm of the industries in which they operate. This paper demonstrates the relevance of the theory of disruptive technologies to academic libraries, higher education and the academic publishing industry. The way universities are organised and how they operate could change radically; scholarly communication could be transformed, placing academic publishers at risk; academic libraries may become irrelevant as new business models emerge. There are strategies that these organisations might adopt to limit the effect of such technologies and/or preferably transform them into sustaining technologies.