USAID Legal Empowerment of the Poor: From Concepts to Assessment
Source: USAID | Year: 2007
The relatively modest literature that bears an explicit “legal empowerment of the poor (LEP)” tag has developed since 2000. It came into being in reaction to what was seen as an excessively narrow concept of legal and judicial reform in the rule of law literature.1 A number of LEP strategies (law reform, judicial reform, legal aid and literacy, democratization, and formalization) are currently jockeying for position within the general concept, which is as yet poorly bounded and integrated.
There is also substantial overlap among the literature on LEP, particularly in governance and human rights. The latter has older and more substantial literature associated with it, while the broad concept of LEP only received its first relatively full expression in 2001, in an Asia Foundation study (initially commissioned as a legal literacy study) published in the annual report of the Asian Development Bank’s Legal Department. The concept’s adoption by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)-based Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor in 2005 dramatically raised its public profile and stimulated a number of papers from development institutions on the topic (e.g., the 2005 World Bank Strategy Statement).
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