Legal empowerment has become an important, yet ill-conceptualized and understudied aspect of international legal development co-operation and good governance promotion. This study seeks to understand what legal empowerment is, how it can aid development, and how it can be improved. The proposed research aims develop a new conceptual framework relating to legal empowerment and on that basis perform an empirical study of industrial pollution victims? legal empowerment in China and Indonesia. The empricial research will study how legal empowerment can help pollution victims in China and Indonesia to overcome the barriers they meet when seeking to invoke their rights. It will analyze the perspectives of pollution victims as well as the legal empowerment organizations that are trying to help them invoke their rights. The empiricial research will yield data to help legal empowerment organizations better coordinate their efforts and meet the demands from pollution victims. The research will have implications beyond China and Indonesia as it will produce a first empirical and critical academic analysis of how legal empowerment can help improve justice for disadvantaged groups, understanding both its success factors and inherent limitations. Eventually, this will lead to a more sophisticated theory of legal empowerment which will assist both academics and practitioners in researching, analyzing and improving legal empowerment and legal reform programmes. It will also lead to a new political-legal understanding of law suitable for complex governance contexts such as the Chinese and Indonesian. This will guide policy makers worldwide engaging in good governance and legal development cooperation work, who have recently turned to embrace the legal empowerment approach. The study?s direct involvement of key-stakeholders both in the research team as well as during the research process will ensure that the research is continually adapted to meet the needs from practitioners. In addition, the project?s key findings will be translated both in policy recommendations in three policy briefs (China, Indonesia and International), as well as in two brochures aimed at pollution victims in China and Indonesia. The research will also help strengthen and build academic and stakeholder networks. First it will involve key law and development scholars and practitioners in the conceptualization of a legal empowerment framework. Second, it will bring practitioners from different fields (local and national, state and non-state, China and Indonesia) together bridging territorial divides that have so far obscured an understanding of legal empowerment and obstructed its coordinated and optimal functioning.