Adopting a comparative analysis, this article examines some recent litigation which has focused on indigenous peoples’ rights across the African continent. The aim is to explore both the potential and the challenges and limitations of litigation as a tool for supporting the rights of indigenous peoples. The article explores the extent to which a specific African jurisprudence is emerging on issues that are essential to indigenous peoples such as non-discrimination, self-identification, land rights and development. It also focuses on the practical issues that arise when engaging with litigation in order to explore the extent to which litigation can contribute to the legal empowerment of some of the most marginalized indigenous communities in Africa.

This article explores one aspect of India’s attempts to address its access to justice dilemma through the establishment of district-level consumer fora. Data points are extracted from 1,400 cases nationwide to piece together a portrait of the input and output of these institutions. The data collected include: win/loss rates; time from filing to decision; presence of attorneys (and their effects on win/loss rates and time from filing to decision); amounts of damages and costs awarded; and types of cases filed. In the end, this sampling of cases, combined with observations and interviews, led to several broad conclusions—that access to justice is increased but not for the marginalized or poor; that the consumer fora are severely underused; and that they are highly localized institutions leaving significant discretion in the hands of forum Presidents to drive the process which greatly varies the effects on access to justice among districts.

In the last decade bottom-up approaches to legal development cooperation have become increasingly popular. Examples are reform ideas and programmes using concepts such as ‘access to justice’ and ‘legal empowerment.’ These approaches share a common concern that legal interventions should benefit the poor, and that their needs and preferences should form the basis for legal reforms. Proponents argue that these approaches are important alternatives to ineffective pre-existing legal reform practices which were based on ‘the rule of law orthodoxy.’ This paper critically discusses the content, context and merits of such bottom-up approaches. It concludes that while these approaches offer advantages, they should not substitute but complement pre-existing legal development cooperation practices and the rule of law paradigm on which they are based. The emergence of these new approaches shows how much legal development cooperation is a field of trends, where doubts about their effectiveness force legal reformers to regularly shift from one paradigm to the next, enthusiastically applauding the seemingly new, while sacrificing the caricaturized old.

This paper reviews the World Bank's existing work in access to justice and suggests directions for further Bank engagement in this area. Access to justice efforts are grouped here into six categories: court reforms, legal aid, information dissemination and education, alternative dispute resolution, public sector accountability, and research. The paper is motivated in part by recent discussions of ‘legal empowerment’; a thread of inquiry that runs through the review is: how do World Bank efforts to increase access to justice affect the agency of poor people? The paper concludes with insights and recommendations that emerge from the Bank's experience.

With a constellation of high profile global thinkers and leaders, the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor promised to reposition law and justice concerns at the centre of thinking on poverty alleviation. The Commission has succeeded in generating greater interest in the nexus between poverty, injustice and legal exclusion and is a welcome addition to the battle of ideas and concomitant battle over resources over how to raise the living standards of the poor and disadvantaged. However, this article, which analyzes the Commission's final report from the perspective of a legal empowerment practitioner, concludes that the Commission is an opportunity missed. The Commission's failure to properly tackle the political economy of reform and to justify its policy agenda with empirical data limits its value to the practitioner and will curtail its impact with policymakers.

The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor has made a considerable contribution to the international development community by focusing attention on concrete legal needs of impoverished populations. As such, it constitutes a fine start for international, regional and domestic efforts to pull together a legal empowerment agenda that will directly benefit such groups. Nevertheless, the Commission's report falls short in key respects. It displays an inordinate faith in employing rational persuasion to grapple with a widespread problem it highlights – how to get self-interested politicians and other elites to forfeit their own advantage for the well-being of society. It is similarly stumbles in addressing how to best implement ambitious legal reforms, so that they have actual impact and do not simply exist on paper. And it does not reconcile the Commission's fundamentally top-down approach with an area of development that is bottom-up in nature. Going forward, it is important to build on the Commission's good start, but depart from its false and even counterproductive steps; the international community should instead draw on successful country-specific legal empowerment experience from diverse contexts. This features increased investment in civil society efforts to make the rule of law a reality, since such initiatives have a better track record than government-centered programs that mainly rely on elite good will. It more specifically involves enhanced long-term funding for domestic and international NGO efforts, both in the form of legal services for the disadvantaged and by integrating such services into broader socioeconomic development programs. The international community should also support impact-oriented applied research and move toward establishing a Millennium Development Goal for legal empowerment

The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) states that workers in the informal economy can be legally empowered by bringing them within the framework of effective legal regulation, in particular, international labour standards. This paper acknowledges the value of extending rights to workers in the informal economy, but argues that CLEP's recommendations are impractical and unrealistic. It shows that neither international standards nor recent national legislation designed to promote the legalization of informal enterprises offers unqualified positive answers to resolve the plight of workers in the informal economy. Given the poverty of prevailing regulatory structures and the pervasive impact of inadequate structures of governance, workers in the informal economy justifiably distrust legal institutions and, as a consequence, do not, in the first instance, resort to legal institutions in their quest for empowerment. This paper offers examples of strategies that have successfully enhanced the social, political and economic power of workers in the informal economy. It concludes, however, that although the legal system has a role to play in consolidating the gains achieved by these strategies, law and legal institutions do not necessarily offer the best point of departure towards effectively empowering workers in the informal economy.

This paper reflects on questions as to whether legal empowerment projects have been able to strike a balance between competing aspects of rights and social justice and change prevalent structural inequalities and power relations that essentially perpetuate disempowerment of the poor and disadvantaged groups in the first place. In other words, do the strategies simply provide ‘quick-fix’ solutions and promote a politically disengaged model of empowerment or do they assist beneficiaries in developing an intrinsic understanding of the issues at hand and the capacity to deal with them in effective ways? Additionally, the paper addresses the problem of impact assessment and sustainability of legal empowerment strategies.

In this article I will first present the main thrust of Hernando de Soto's design, and then summarize praise and criticisms of his work. Next, I will address the question of to what extent De Soto's design is innovative. To this end I present a brief overview of past experience. I will then introduce some preliminary results of an international Leiden-based research project that has addressed the general causal relations between legalization, tenure security and poverty alleviation which constitute the basis of De Soto's argument. Most case studies of this project found that for De Soto's plans to be effective, a range of conditions had to be fulfilled. As long as these conditions are not fulfilled – which happens to be the unfortunate reality throughout the developing world – his plans will not work. Unfortunately, his proposals then are based on a whole set of unrealistic assumptions. Finally, in order to place De Soto's work in the context of today's development policies, with their emphasis on good governance and rule of law promotion, I will present a conceptual scheme which unpacks the key concepts of development, governance and the rule of law. In the concluding part I speculate on what we can learn from the success of De Soto's compelling theories, and from various criticisms of and responses to them How can these lessons be beneficial for a realistic rule of law promotion?

Legal Empowerment of the Poor (LEP), which has recently been launched as a new conceptual and operational tool for poverty eradication, has attracted considerable attention in the face of claims that poverty persists partly because the poor do not enjoy legal rights or the power to exercise those rights. This essay provides a brief overview of the conceptual foundations of the LEP approach as reflected primarily in the main report of the Commission of Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP). It thereafter critically examines the LEP's potential of promoting pro-poor governance and strengthening the protection and promotion of basic socio-economic and political rights of the poor. It argues that it is not only crucial to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of the concept by recognizing the links between legal and political empowerment, but to also closely link the LEP with the general development experience so far.