Finding the Spaces for Change: A Power Analysis

1 1 IntroductionAround the world, new Spaces and opportunities areemerging for citizen engagement in policy processes,from local to global levels. Policy instruments, legalframeworks and support programmes for promotingthem abound. Yet, despite the widespread rhetoricalacceptance, it is also becoming clear that simplycreating new institutional arrangements will notnecessarily result in greater inclusion or pro-poorpolicy change . Rather, much depends on the natureof the Power relations which surround and imbuethese new, potentially more democratic, questions are to be asked. Does this newterrain represent a real shift in Power ? Does it reallyopen up Spaces where participation and citizen voicecan have an influence? Will increased engagementwithin them risk simply re-legitimating the statusquo, or will it contribute to transforming patterns ofexclusion and social injustice and to challengingpower relationships?

2 In a world where the local andthe global are so interrelated, where patterns ofgovernance and decision making are changing soquickly, how can those seeking pro-poor changedecide where best to put their efforts and whatstrategies do they use?Whether concerned with participation and inclusion,realising rights or changing policies, more and moredevelopment actors seeking change are alsobecoming aware of the need to engage with andunderstand this phenomenon called Power . Yetsimultaneously, the nature and expressions of powerare also rapidly changing. The very spread andadoption by powerful actors of the language anddiscourse of participation and inclusion confusesboundaries of who has authority and who does not,who should be on the inside and who is on the outside of decision-making and policymakingarenas.

3 Changing governance arrangements, whichcall for co-governance and participatorygovernance challenge our traditional categories ofthe rulers and the ruled, the policymakers and thepublic. The use of terms such as partnership and shared ownership by large, powerful actors like theWorld Bank and the International Monetary Fund(IMF) invite engagement on a level playing field butobscures inequalities of resources and Power . Theadoption by multinational corporate actors ofnotions of corporate citizenship , blurs traditional us and them distinctions between economic powerholders and those who might negatively be affectedby their corporate practices. And in the midst of allof this changing language and discourse, rapidprocesses of globalisation challenge ideas of community and the nation-state , reconfiguring thespatial dynamics of Power , and changing theassumptions about the entry points for of these changes point to the need for activists,researchers, policymakers and donors who areconcerned about development and change to turnour attention to how to analyse and understand thechanging configurations of Power .

4 If we want tochange Power relationships, to make them moreinclusive, just or pro-poor, we must understand moreabout where and how to engage. This article sharesone approach to Power Analysis ; an approach whichhas come to be known as the Power cube andprovides some reflections and examples of how thisapproach has been applied in differing Reflecting on Power analysisThough everyone possesses and is affected by Power ,the meanings of Power and how to understand it are diverse and often contentious (as the articles inthis IDS Bulletinillustrate). Some see Power as heldby actors, some of whom are powerful while othersare relatively powerless. Others see it as morepervasive, embodied in a web of relationships anddiscourses which affect everyone, but which noFinding the Spaces for Change: A Power AnalysisJohn Gaventa*IDS BulletinVolume 37 Number 6 November 2006 Institute of Development Studies23single actor holds.

5 Some see Power as a zero-sum concept to gain Power for one set of actors meansthat others must give up some Power . Since rarelydo the powerful give up their Power easily, this ofteninvolves conflict and Power struggles . Others seepower as more fluid and accumulative. Power is nota finite resource; it can be used, shared or created byactors and their networks in many multiple see Power as a negative trait to holdpower is to exercise control over others. Others seepower to be about capacity and agency to bewielded for positive is often used with other descriptive over refers to the ability of the powerful toaffect the actions and thought of the powerless. Thepower to is important for the capacity to act; toexercise agency and to realise the potential of rights,citizenship or voice.

6 Power within often refers togaining the sense of self-identity, confidence andawareness that is a precondition for action. Power with refers to the synergy which can emerge throughpartnerships and collaboration with others, or throughprocesses of collective action and alliance own view of Power was shaped by my ownhistory of engaging with Power relations in aparticular context. As a young graduate in politicalscience, I began working with grassroots citizens in aremote mining valley of one of the poorest parts ofthe USA in their efforts to claim political, economicand social rights vis- -visgovernment and a London-based corporate mine owner. The conventional viewsof democracy and Power in the USA which I hadlearned in my studies failed to explain the reality Iencountered.

7 Though violations of democratic rights,enormous inequalities in wealth and appallingenvironmental living conditions were to be foundeverywhere, there was little visible conflict or actionfor was something about Power which had lednot only to defeat where voices had been raised, butalso, somehow, over time, the voices had beensilenced of my work then shiftedto how citizens recovered a sense of their capacity toact, and how they mobilised to get their issues heardand responded to in the public agenda. For almost20 years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s,while also teaching and researching at the Universityof Tennessee, I was practically engaged with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working forgrassroots empowerment, the Highlander Centerbased in southern USA.

8 Much of our approachinvolved Finding ways to strengthen the capacity ofordinary citizens and to analyse and challenge theinequalities of Power which affected their joining the Institute for Development Studies(IDS) in the mid-1990s, I continued to work onprocesses of citizen participation and engagement inother parts of the world. In the internationaldevelopment field, I discovered a host of approachesfor participation in research and learning, advocacyand community mobilisation, poverty assessmentsand policy processes, local governance anddecentralisation, and rights-based and citizenship-building approaches. At the same time, with theirincreasing acceptance in mainstream developmentdiscourse, many of these approaches riskedbecoming techniques which did not pay sufficientattention to the Power relations within andsurrounding their use.

9 Increasingly, the work of theParticipation Group at IDS and many of ourassociates began to look for approaches which putan understanding of Power back in the centre of ourunderstanding of the concepts and practices own work focused mainly on the intersection ofpower with processes of citizen engagement ingovernance at the local, national and global with Anne Marie Goetz asked questions aboutthe most important Spaces in which citizens couldeffectively engage, and how to move citizen voicefrom access, to presence, to influence (Goetz andGaventa 2001). Work with other colleaguesexamined how citizens participated in policy spacessurrounding poverty reduction, and concluded with acall for moving from from policy to Power (Brock ). Through the Development ResearchCentre on Citizenship, Participation andAccountability, I worked and learned with a researchteam, led by Andrea Cornwall and Vera Coehlo,which was examining the Spaces and dynamics ofcitizen participation (Cornwall and Coehlo 2004;2006).

10 Some work, through LogoLink,3focused oncitizen participation at the local level. Other workfocused on global citizen action (Edwards andGaventa 2001). In all of these areas, the issues ofpower and its links with processes of citizenengagement, participation and deepening forms ofdemocracy were always lurking somewhere close tothe the Spaces for change : A Power AnalysisIncreasingly, we began to search for approacheswhich could make the implicit Power perspectivemore explicit, and which would help to examine theinterrelationships of the forms of Power which wewere encountering in different political Spaces andsettings. Building on my previous work based on the three dimensions of Power developed by StevenLukes (Lukes 1974; Gaventa 1980), I began to arguethat Luke s three forms of Power must also beunderstood in relation to how Spaces forengagement are created, and the levels of Power (from local to global), in which they each of these the Spaces , levels andforms of Power as themselves separate butinterrelated dimensions, each of which had at leastthree components within them, these dimensionscould be visually linked together into a Power cube (Figure 1).