Tiyana Jovanovic (website)
University of Queensland / Indian Institute Technology Delhi, 2025
Abstract
This doctoral thesis challenges the dominant modernist paradigm in development thinking and practice, offering a novel conceptualisation of empowerment that transcends the limitations of the agency vs power binary, offering and explanatory framework for empowerment grounded in the critical realist philosophy. Situated within the broader context of global development efforts, it particularly focuses on women’s empowerment and the use of ICTs in development interventions in India, examining these issues against the backdrop of India’s development agenda since independence, with a focus on how modernisation, globalisation, and neoliberalism have influenced approaches to women’s empowerment. Two case studies of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) interventions led by social-tech organisation Gram Vaani in rural India form the empirical basis of the study. The dialectic critical realist MELD Schema formed the methodology for fieldwork, and the data analysis was guided by an interdisciplinary, non-linear, iterative process guided by the DREI(C) schema (Description, Retroduction, Elimination, Identification, and Correction) to uncover causal mechanisms of empowerment. The key findings include the development of an explanatory empowerment framework that conceptualises empowerment as a process of building an agent’s operational power through the embeddedness of opportunity-structures across four planes of social being— material, psycho-social, structural, and relationships—which enables a dynamic understanding of the relationship between empowerment and reflexivity in the Transformational Model of Social Activity, where an agent’s mode of reflexivity influences their perception of empowering actions, while engagement with opportunity- structures can shape reflexive goals. Reflexivity and empowerment interact to generate three distinct causal capacities for agents to shape their social reality— stability, adaptability, and transformability— which coalesce as resilience. The recognition of resilience as a totality of empowering capacities offers a non-dual logic for development that aligns with the dynamic nature of change itself, arguing for a shift in development thinking from linear, progress-driven models to a more holistic approach grounded in the logic of resilience. This approach recognises change as a dynamic unfolding of continuities, discontinuities, and emergence, rather than a linear series of static outcomes. It offers a pathway to development that works through modernity rather than seeking to transcend it, recognising that development cannot exist beyond modernity, only through engagement with its contradictions and potentialities. The research contributes to both theoretical discussions on empowerment in development, and in ICT4D interventions, and offers a set of tools for practitioners to apply this research in the field through a shift from indicator-led approached to a reimagining of Theory of Change to enabling more context-sensitive and effective empowerment strategies. Whilst it challenges existing paradigms, it offers a constructive framework for future research in development studies and for development as facilitate transformative praxis.
Methods
Qualitative