Empowerment promotion is a major challenge for community psychology. Practitioners’ understanding of change processes and relationship building capacity are crucial elements for this.
We reflect on some methodological and theoretical frames. We consider that the naturalistic paradigm and method can be applied to empowerment promotion, particularly if it is focused on creating change based on people’s voice, participation and actions (Aguiar & Moniz, 2006). Besides, it helps to understand elements, boundaries and timings of change process. So, it can be a very useful method for action research.
We believe that empowerment promotion is a relational challenge and that community development paths are based on relationship building, from the group to the community levels. It is a major challenge to promote empowerment, because to listen to voices of people, to understand their strengths, and to work with them in a cooperative way implies from the practitioners an understanding of empowering aspects of change processes and assuming a role of facilitator.
The challenge practitioners face of combining top-down and bottom-up approaches is also an important aspect that have impact on individual, relational, organizational and community levels of empowerment promotion, where creativity play a special role.