An authorization engine is provided in a remote device for mobile authorization using policy based access control. To ensure that remote devices can enforce consistent authorization policies even when the devices are not connected to the server, the remote device downloads the relevant authorization policies when the business objects are downloaded and enforces the policies when operations are invoked. The memory footprint of downloadable authorization policies is reduced to fit onto a resource-constrained remote device. A policy evaluation engine interprets and enforces the downloaded policies on the remote device using only the limited computational resources of the remote device.