In the 1970s, participatory development, and in the 1980s, participatory rural appraisal emerged as alternatives to top-down approaches, whereby the participation and leadership of communities themselves, especially the poor, was considered essential as a process of empowerment (Batliwala, 2007; Chambers, 2009, Jupp & Ali, 2010).

Today, women and the poor are still the two populations typically foregrounded in discussions of empowerment. The empowerment of vulnerable groups is included as a primary strategy towards ensuring equity under the Sustainable Development Goals established in 2015 (UN, 2015). Increasingly, though, the term is understood to be multidimensional, culturally specific, and relational, meaning it can be used to analyze a person’s position along other axes of power and identity as well (Alkire and Ibrahim, 2007).

Measuring empowerment or agency, like wellbeing, involves a wide variety of potential metrics - the objective and subjective, individual and collective, universal and “domain specific”, psychological, and intrinsic or externally derived (Narayan, 2005; Ibrahim & Alkire, 2007, p. 383).  Some measures involve the internal or moral domains of empowerment such as personal fulfilment and human rights, whereas others involve the relational, such as engagement in social and political action, and still others more concrete, material indicators such as economic shifts (Ibrahim & Alkire, 2007). Self-assessment methods and subjective measures are more commonly used and accepted to ascertain empowerment or wellbeing than measures of external conditions (Narayan, 2005). This is in part because one’s perspective on their power is determined by the relative context in which that power had previously been absent. 

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Ibramin and Alkire (2007) propose a self-assessment-based framework for measuring choice in four domains: control over personal decisions, autonomy in a specific domain (e.g., household), change in one’s individual life, and change within community (Ibrahim & Alkire, 2007). The most common arenas for evaluating empowerment and agency involve the household and politics, and should focus on women at the personal-level, relational-level and societal-level (Huis et al., 2017) The World Bank Measuring Empowerment (ME) Framework, is a comprehensive set of indicators for measuring degrees of empowerment in three parts: (1) whether there is an opportunity for a choice, (2) whether the person uses that opportunity to choose, and (3) whether it results in a desired outcome once chosen (Alsop & Heinsohn, 2005). 

Jupp and Ali (2010) recommend a two-part process: The first is led by the in-group or local participants in conceptualizing what is to be measured, deciding indicators and method, and generating insights to avoid bias from outsider preferences. The second part, led by outsiders, involves collecting, aggregating, and analyzing participant data for independent assessment of results.

Because empowerment is context-dependent, interventions need to be informed, if not determined by the local populations they are intended to benefit to ensure empowerment gains are in alignment with local preferences and not contributing to majority-dominant perceptions and processes (Chambers, 2009; Huis et al., 2017; Narayan, 2005).