Empowerment to Participate: A Case Study of Participation by Indian Sex Workers in HIV Prevention FLORA CORNISH * School of Nursing, Midwifery and Community Health, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow G4 0BA, UK ABSTRACT The popularity of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ in international development discourse is not matched by sophisticated conceptualisation of these terms. Critics have argued that their vagueness allows ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ to be used indiscriminately to describe interventions which vary from tokenism to genuine devolving of power to the community. This paper suggests that conceptualising empowerment and participation simply in terms of a scale of ‘more or less’ participation or ‘more or less’ empowerment does not capture the qualitatively different forms of empowerment that are necessary for different activities. Instead, the paper conceptualises participa- tion in terms of concrete domains of action in which people may be empowered to take part. An ethnographic case study of a participatory HIV prevention project run by sex workers in Kolkata illustrates the argument. Four domains of activity in which sex workers may participate are distinguished: (1) participating in accessing project services; (2) participating in providing project services; (3) participating in shaping project workers’ activity; (4) participating in defining project goals. To be empowered to participate in each domain depends upon a different set of resources. Asking the question ‘empowerment to do what?’ of health promotion projects is proposed as a way of facilitating appropriate project design. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: community development; empowerment; HIV prevention; India; participation; sex workers ‘Empowerment’ and ‘participation’ are two of the most popular and at the same time controversial concepts in community development literature (Botes & van Rensburg, 2000; Kelly & Van Vlaenderen, 1995; Riger, 1993; Zakus & Lysack, 1998). Both concepts refer to community members’ active engagement in and ownership of local development. The concepts also both suffer from insufficient theoretical articulation, so that they are applied Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology J. Community. Appl. Soc. Psychol., 16: 301–315 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/casp.866 *Correspondence to: F. Cornish, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Community Health, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow G4 0BA, UK. E-mail: flora.cornish@gcal.ac.uk Contract/grant sponsors: Economic & Social Research Council Postgraduate Studentship; London School of Economics Research Studentship; University of London Central Research Fund. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 10 March 2006