Strengthening community empowerment initiatives as a route to greater equity: an English case study

Abstract Community empowerment is prominent in global and national policies that aim to increase social and health equity. This paper describes the pathways through which community empowerment could in theory contribute to greater equity and highlights concerns about the potential for current initiatives to deliver positive impacts. Understanding and addressing imbalances in power, valuing knowledge people acquire from their experience of inequalities and supporting people to build alliances beyond the boundaries of their own communities can all contribute to addressing some of the limitations of contemporary empowerment initiatives. An initiative in nine disadvantaged neighbourhoods in NW England sought to address these concerns, through a Community Research and Engagement Network (COREN). The initiative aimed to enhance and direct collective capabilities at action on social inequalities driving health inequalities. The COREN model explicitly considered how local power dynamics could be shifted to enable residents to operate as equals alongside other actors and how their experiential knowledge could be valued as equal to that of professionals and academics. An evaluation highlighted how the COREN had contributed to positive impacts including perceived influence, social connections and feeling valued, alongside cultural, economic, environmental and governance impacts. However, local empowerment initiatives can only be part of the solution to social and health inequalities, as the root causes of these inequalities lie outside the control of people living and working in disadvantaged areas.