| Summary: | The great interest in participation and empowerment is because they provide positive outcomes and are still favoured by international governmental organisations. However, very scant research has been conducted to examine if and how empowerment through participation empowers local people, especially in the complex political and economic aspects of the country. It argues that in complex economic and political situations, Arendt’s theory of power is needed to examine whether the local villagers were empowered to improve their wellbeing in the rural development programme in Malaysia. From the findings, public participation in the case study village was not visible, let alone empowerment. The elements such as deliberation and dialogue between local villagers and local leaders were not visible, the collective decisions were made only between local leaders and public officials and the introduction of the Co-operative as a means to empower local villagers was not successful. The suggestions were made to improve the findings of the research. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.
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