The general aim of this thesis is to analyse, in the context of health promotion, the conceptions of empowerment, participation and dialogicity to be found in the Declarations and Letters on Health Promotion produced in the period 1986 - 2005, from the perspective of Critical Educational Theory. Specific objectives were: to identify the conceptions of empowerment, participation and dialogicity present in the Declarations; characterise the themes and meanings that these conceptions express in each of the documents, from the perspective of critical educational theory. The bulk of the thesis is a qualitative document analysis, the corpos of which was composed of seven documents. The analytical tools used were a set of techniques and procedures from Content Analysis, utilized with the intention of interpreting the documents. The corpos comprises Declarations resulting from international conferences on Health Promotion, published by the World Health Organization and the Pan-American Health Organization. The results obtained indicate that the meanings of empowerment, contained in these oficial documents on Health Promotion, focus on the transfer of knowledge and the development of abilities, while participation presents itself predominately with the meaning of social control, power and power of decision. An important result was the complete lack of any conception of dialogicity in the documents analysed. These results show that these conceptions and meanings, as interpreted in this analysis, do not contemplate a transformatory práxis, one of the essential principles of Health Promotion and Critical Educational Theory. It is suggested that the possibility of realising the proposals for Health Promotion contained in these Letters and Declarations, by both individuals and colectives, necessitates the contributions of Critical Educational Theory.