Resources, Agency, Achievements: Re¯ections on the Measurement of Women's Empowerment Naila Kabeer ABSTRACT This paper begins from the understanding that women's empowerment is about the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such an ability. A wide gap separates this processual under- standing of empowerment from the more instrumentalist forms of advocacy which have required the measurement and quanti®cation of empowerment. The ability to exercise choice incorporates three inter-related dimensions: resources (de®ned broadly to include not only access, but also future claims, to both material and human and social resources); agency (including processes of decision making, as well as less measurable manifestations of agency such as negotiation, deception and manipulation); and achievements (well-being outcomes). A number of studies of women's empowerment are analysed to make some important methodological points about the measurement of empowerment. The paper argues that these three dimensions of choice are indivisible in determining the meaning of an indicator and hence its validity as a measure of empowerment. The notion of choice is further quali®ed by referring to the conditions of choice, its content and consequences. These quali®cations represent an attempt to incorporate the structural parameters of individual choice in the analysis of women's empowerment. CONCEPTUALIZING EMPOWERMENT Introduction Advocacy on behalf of women which builds on claimed synergies between feminist goals and ocial development priorities has made greater inroads into the mainstream development agenda than advocacy which argues for these goals on intrinsic grounds. There is an understandable logic to this. In a situation of limited resources, where policymakers have to adjudicate between competing claims (Razavi, 1997), advocacy for feminist goals in intrinsic terms takes policy makers out of their familiar conceptual territory of welfare, poverty and eciency, and into the nebulous territory of power and social injustice. There is also a political logic in that those who stand to gain most from such advocacy carry very little clout with those who set the agendas in major policy-making institutions. Development and Change Vol. 30 (1999), 435±464. # Institute of Social Studies 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Rd, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK. A longer version of this paper has been published as UNRISD Discussion Paper 108 (May 1999).