Decolonizing Empowerment: Implications for Sustainable Well‐Being

Dutt, Grabe, and Castro's (2015) research on implications of market participation for Maasai women's empowerment provides an important basis for rethinking liberatory standards of psychological science and international gender development. Drawing upon their research, we apply a decolonial feminist psychology analysis to the topic of empowerment. This perspective suggests that neoliberal interventions to promote empowerment and well‐being in Majority‐World spaces (i) may cause harm by depriving people of environmentally afforded connection and (ii) reproduce historical and ongoing forms of (neo)colonial domination in ways that are inconsistent with the broader empowerment of humanity in general.