Evaluating the empowering potential of community-based health schemes: The case of community health policies in the UK since 1997

Evaluating the empowering potential of community-based health promotion schemes is acknowledged as problematic, not least because of the conceptual ambiguity surrounding community empowerment. This paper discusses the problems involved in evaluating community empowerment, using policy developments in the UK since 1997 as a case study. It seeks more clearly to delineate the concept of community empowerment from other community-based approaches to health improvement, and suggests that the urban political science literature provides some useful insights with regard to the operationalization of community empowerment in process-focused evaluative research