Linking the prepositions: using power analysis to inform strategies for social action

ABSTRACT

This article reviews longstanding debates about the relationship between power over and power to – often posed as the tension between domination and emancipation. It then turns to several frameworks which integrate these approaches to inform strategies for social action. In particular, it focuses on recent empirical studies which apply one such framework, the ‘powercube’, to glean insights into how social actors navigate across multiple forms, spaces and levels of power. In so doing, we gain clues into how relatively powerless groups develop the capacities for agency and action which challenge domination and in turn give new possibilities for emancipation.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• empowerment
• collective action
• agency
• Lukes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Many thanks to Fiammetta Wegner for her research assistance in identifying and reviewing some of the applications of the powercube referred to in this article, and to Giulio Gallarotti for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.

2. See further information at www.powercube.net.

3. See the important contribution from James Scott on this point, who argued that my Power and Powerlessness book tended to underplay the importance of resistance. (Scott 1990, Chapter 4).

4. Just Associates is a feminist movement building organisation working internationally. https://www.justassociates.org/en/about-us.

5. This book also brings together a number of other valuable contributions from activists working on power and empowerment, ‘related to organising, movement-building, citizen voice and state accountability, women’s empowerment, human rights, indigenous peoples’ autonomy, conflict transformation, digital activism, organisational learning and popular education, among others’ (2020, p. 4).

6. Drawing from work by Gutierrez, Rymes and Larson (1995 cited Schutz 2019, p. 58), counterscript refers to interventions in socio-cultural practices that counter dominant discourses and understandings, somewhat similar to James Scott’s (1990) ‘hidden transcripts of resistance.’

7. Where groups seek to present a united front (as they fight their way into spaces controlled by the powerful). To Schutz (2019) collaborative approaches work to generate new power through deliberation, whereas ‘the solidarity approach treats power as relatively zero-sum, and seeks to take power away from the powerful’ (p. 64).

8. Fung argues that this framework is meant to complement not rebut other frameworks. However, he explicitly rejects ‘hidden’ power as a standalone form of power, arguing that in any of these levels, power may be hidden or more visible.

9. The powercube emerged from work with a number of colleagues at the Institute of Development Studies, including Jethro Pettit and Andrea Cornwall, Just Associates, including Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller, and Oxfam, including Jo Rowlands and Irene Guijt.

10. While this is a new essay, I draw on these past works to describe the powercube and its origins.

11. These applications are reviewed in a companion article on lessons for how to apply the powercube framework (Gaventa 2020).

12. Adapted from www.powercube.net.

13. Adapted from www.powercube.net.

14. Though to my knowledge, they do not make a direct link, the point about boundaries reinforces the work by Hayward who ‘suggests that we might understand power ‘as the network of social boundaries that delimit fields of possible action’. Freedom, on the other hand, ‘is the capacity to participate effectively in shaping the social limits that define what is possible’ (Hayward 1988, cited Gaventa 2007, p. 214). In this sense, participation is not only the right to participate effectively in a given space, but the right to define and shape the boundaries of that space.

15. Brosnan (2012) makes a similar argument in her work with user committees in the field of mental health, arguing that through applying the powercube service users could develop greater awareness of hidden and invisible forms of power, and their potential to influence decision makers.

16. Adapted from www.powercube.net.

17. As Haugaard (2012) has argued: ‘The fact that normatively desirable power and domination are constituted through the same processes is not chance: the effectiveness of power as domination is parasitic upon power as emancipation’ (p. 33). See also the empirical study by Andreassen and Crawford who make a similar argument in their study of human rights advocacy (2013, p. 240).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Gaventa

John Gaventa is a Professor at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Linking research and practice throughout his career, he has written and worked extensively on issues of power and participation, citizenship and citizen action, governance and accountability, and participatory forms of research. He is author of the award winning book Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. He has also served as Director of Research at IDS, Director of the Coady Institute in Canada and the Highlander Center in the US. In 2011 he received the Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize for his distinguished scholarship on civic learning, citizen participation and engaged research. He holds a DPhil degree from Oxford University.