A response to ‘Powercube: understanding power for social change’

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Notes

1. Support for developing the Powercube approach was initially enabled through a joint grant for the programmes of the Participation, Power and Social Change team at the Institute of Development Studies from the Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC).

2. As a matter of transparency and full disclosure, Gaventa serves in a voluntary capacity as the chair of the Board of Oxfam Great Britain.

3. See www.justassociates.org and, for example, VeneKlasen and Miller (2002).

4. Carnegie UK Trust, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and City Parochial Foundation.

5. Interestingly, for instance, much of the initial thinking behind this work arises from Gaventa’s book Power and powerlessness in an Appalachian Valley (1980), which traces in one place over a century the rise of corporate land ownership, its uses of violence to create and maintain a vastly unequal status quo, and how major power shifts happened at key historical moments, opening or closing the opportunities and spaces for popular action.

6. This work has since been developed, much further through the related work of the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability, including the important work by Pearce (2007), which theoretically elaborates her more popular work using the Powercube in Colombia, as well as work with McGee and Wheeler (Pearce, McGee and Wheeler 2011) on the ‘perverse interfaces’ of democracy, violence and citizenship. These and other resources may be found at www.drc-citizenship.org.

7. In addition, since the launch of the Powercube, a number of the publications of the related Citizenship DRC have focused more in this area, including Thompson and Tapscott (2009) and Schattan and von Lieres (2010).