Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The concept of ‘empowerment’ has recently become an indispensable part of mainstream development vocabulary, appealing to a diverse and contradictory range of development thinkers, practitioners and policy-makers. This paper critically engages with the discourse that invokes empowerment by exploring how strategies aimed at empowering Kenyan coffee producers intersect with the power relations that underpin the production and trade of coffee. It does so by taking an anthropological approach to the development of Kenya’s political economy in the era of post-structural adjustment to, identify contradictions or tensions between mainstream development policies and the international regulation of the coffee industry.