Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality

Abstract

Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on overlapping and closely related topicsthe rule of law, the functioning of judicial systems, property rights, labour politics, and business and governance, among others. Research on legal empowerment has been largely applied, with clearest grounding in the fields of law and economics. This special issue speaks to this gap with contributions on six core areas of legal empowerment. This article frames the collection. It provides a brief introduction to legal empowerment and advances two broad arguments. First, an ethnic group-focused approach is a useful starting point in considering the impact of legal empowerment and other development interventions. Second, the state via the law contributes to ethnic inequalities in four broad waysvia its written laws, their implementation and actual practice, historical legacies of law and practice, and ethnic hegemony embedded in the system. Thinking about legal empowerment initiatives within this framework provides understanding both of their potential and their limitations.

Horizontal inequality as an outcome

“…In terms of government policy, there is substantial research into affirmative action and disadvantaged populations, but less work into how other types of programmes and policy instruments affect horizontal inequality. The impact of development interventions to reduce poverty, for instance, is generally analyzed in terms of individuals and households, with relatively little attention to impacts on groups (Gisselquist, 2018). More broadly, there is considerable space for exploring other explanatory factors.…”

Horizontal inequality as a dependent variable

“…In terms of government policy, there is substantial research into affirmative action and disadvantaged populations, but less work into how other types of programmes and policy instruments affect horizontal inequality. The impact of development interventions to reduce poverty, for instance, is generally analysed in terms of individuals and households, with relatively little attention to impacts on groups (Gisselquist 2018). More broadly, there is considerable space for exploring other explanatory factors.…”

Social mobility and inequality between groups

“…Finally, the above discussion has implications for some particular levers of change depending on the factors influencing ethnic mobility levels. For instance, access to justice and legal empowerment initiatives may have some success in addressing discrimination linked to informal institutions and practice by informing individuals from disadvantaged groups of their legal rights and providing assistance in the exercise of those rights (Gisselquist 2019a;Goodwin and Maru 2017). Overall, this paper suggests that the role of the state is important in addressing horizontal inequality through mobility.…”

“…In a still broader sense, public institutions generally can be seen to reflect the cultural dominance and preferences of the dominant or majority group, with implications in wide-ranging areas (Gisselquist 2019a). For instance, 'justice' as embodied in many legal systems in Latin America is rooted in Western law traditions that differ in some ways substantially from those of indigenous communities.…”