Ellen Hillbom

The legal empowerment approach is a recent attempt to be specific about the role of institutions for the future eradication of poverty. This is a broad concept that includes not only the national formal judicial system in a country, but all formal and informal institutional structures providing the rules of the game of human interaction in any given society. It has invited a lot of debate as to what the role of the law is in relation to other institutional structures, how the concept of empowerment is to be understood and how the two enhances the process of poverty reduction and economic development (see e.g. Banik 2008; Bruns 2007; Moore 2001; Sengupta 2008; Singh 2009). Focus in this paper will be on one of the four pillars of legal empowerment presented by CLEP, namely property rights. The promotion of the fourth pillar as a key to poverty reduction and economic growth and development rests on the assumption that it is generally the poor who are lacking the legal support for their property. Legal protection of their assets is regarded as the first concern of the poor and such protection would secure livelihoods and give incentives for investments (CLEP 2008: 51). Finally, the paper is to relate Legal Empowerment to a specific case of property rights formation and power struggles over agricultural resource in a rural sub-Sahara African setting, namely irrigation water among the Meru of Tanzania.