Power, Empowerment and Social Change

Rosemary McGee, Jethro Pettit, Rosemary McGee, Jethro Pettit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351272308
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This book uncovers how power operates around the world, and how it can be resisted or transformed through empowered collective action and social leadership. The stakes have never been higher. Recent years have seen a rapid escalation of inequalities, the rise of new global powers and corporate interests, increasing impunity of human rights violations, suppression of civil society, and a re-shaping of democratic processes by post-truth, populist and nationalist politics.

Rather than looking at power through the lenses of agency or structure alone, this book views power and empowerment as complex and multidimensional societal processes, defined by pervasive social norms, conditions, constraints and opportunities. Bridging theory and practice, the book explores real-world applications using a selection of frameworks, tools, case studies, examples, resources and reflections from experience to support actors to analyse their positioning and align themselves with progressive social forces.

Compiled with social change practitioners, students and scholars in mind, Power, Empowerment and Social Change is the perfect volume for anyone involved in politics, international development, sociology, human rights and environmental justice who is looking for fresh insights for transforming power in favour of relatively less powerful people.

PART 1

Introduction

1

INTRODUCTION: POWER, EMPOWERMENT AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Jethro Pettit and Rosemary McGee

Rethinking power in critical times

We live in contentious and critical times. While humanity has made enormous progress on many fronts – from health and wellbeing, to educational opportunities, to economic prosperity, to functional government, to scientific and technical innovations – efforts to secure the equitable distribution and sustainability of these achievements are failing, putting our societies and the planet itself in peril. Struggles for justice, basic rights and the environment have become inseparable from the struggle for the survival of all. Yet, rather than uniting around common interests, societies seem more divided by powerful political, economic and religious forces. Deepening inequalities which could inspire greater collective action for change are exploited by populist narratives that pitch the poor against the poor. Political mobilisation for progressive change is suppressed, while space for civil society is constrained by politicised regulation, funding strictures, state surveillance and the criminalisation of protest. Human rights and environmental defenders, particularly among indigenous peoples, are killed with impunity under the naked collusion of governments, extractive corporations, organised criminals and security forces. Hard-won rights for women, people of colour, religious groups, LGBTQ and other discriminated-against people are being rolled back in many places. Efforts to report facts and scientific evidence are weakened by the ideological fragmentation of ‘post-truth politics’, facilitated by a growing dependence on the internet and social media.

In the face of these challenges, there are many starting points for analysis and action. One is to deepen our understanding of power – what it is, how it works and what can be done about it. The study of power has been around for decades, centuries, even millennia, and much can be applied from this scholarship and philosophy to present-day power dynamics. Some would argue that there is nothing new under the sun, just age-old human patterns of domination, control and resistance surfacing in new ways. Yet the complex and disturbing crises we face call not for fatalism, but for a sharp reappraisal of how power operates in and around people’s struggles for equity, dignity and survival. The academic literature on power often neglects the experiences, insights and theories of those working for social change, and the practical implications of power theory. While appreciating existing wisdom about power, there is a need to revisit concepts, to break out of disciplinary silos and debates, to intersect theories and to identify the strategic implications of power analyses.

This book was conceived as a resource that might help make sense of power and empowerment in present-day processes of social change, and to put this understanding to use. The authors explore the multiple dimensions of power and empowerment at play in their practices 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. Interpreting these experiences with ideas from power literature, and bringing their experiences to bear on those ideas, the authors bridge theory and practice with critical and reflexive analyses of the practical uses of conceptual frameworks, methods and approaches. Through micro-level, ethnographic, inductive and reflective accounts of experience, the chapters explore what people think and do about power and empowerment, not only what is written about it. Focusing on multiple and intersecting power dynamics generally less explored in mainstream power literature – despite their significant practical import – the authors translate fresh insights into approaches for shifting power relations in favour of relatively less powerful people.

In the realm of politics, the conventional view of power as agency based on liberal, pluralist and political economy framings conceived citizens as free agents. People will inform themselves of their options, form alliances and engage civilly with political parties and leaders to secure rights, entitlements and accountability. Such a view is not sufficient on its own; nor is it suitable for all contexts. While useful for identifying the power of agents, their interests, intentions and alliances in more visible political processes, this lens can obscure the way power is embedded in socialised norms, beliefs and behaviour, shaping the boundaries of what is considered politically possible. On the other hand, with a purely discursive and structural view of power as reproduced through hegemonic norms and narratives, the scope for individual and collective agency is seen as very limited – even while structure, as the ordering of society, can enable actors to act collaboratively (Haugaard 2003). In this book, power is treated as iterative, intersectional and multidimensional, departing from the dualist ‘agency vs structure’ lenses that tend to prevail in theoretical debates, and avoiding the rational or causal determinism of these two perspectives. While considering actors, their drivers and motives as well as the institutions and structures that uphold inequalities, the authors draw attention to the ways in which socialised norms, constraints and opportunities for agency are actually experienced, formally and less visibly, and how moments of power can be resisted or transformed through social action and leadership.

Venturing into the terrain of ‘unruly politics’, for example, the book sheds light on the ways that subalterns create, take and wield power as collective resistance, often in unexpected ways that make gains by undermining received truths and power/knowledge complexes. In feminist movement-building efforts, authors explore the power of mobilising alternative visions and values within society, going beyond conventional approaches to campaigning. The power of indigenous movements for autonomy, health and natural resource rights is shown to be grounded in life-worlds incompatible with colonial logics of individualism, ownership and authority. Authors also explore the ways in which change agents can learn and unlearn power, reflectively analysing their own relative positioning to align themselves with progressive forces. With this approach, the scholarship on power is rebalanced by articulating a more practical understanding about ‘agency-based’ and ‘structural’ forms of power and their intersections; about the processes that reproduce or shift these complex dimensions of power; and about how to apply these appreciations of power in the context of social change activism.

Power debates, frameworks and concepts

There are contending approaches to understanding power in society and politics, and no agreed definitions, famously making power an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Lukes 1974/2005: 14). Yet the various dimensions of power that have been theorised, even where incongruent, are all worthy of inquiry. As we have seen, power is often regarded as a form of agency – whether the ability of some to dominate others against their interests, the ability to set agendas and to influence values and beliefs, or the ability to resist and act according to perceived self-interests despite pressures to the contrary. Here power is understood as capabilities exercised by particular individuals or groups, whether to coerce and control, to shape norms and narratives (as a more subtle but enduring means of control), or to resist domination and claim entitlements. Alternatively, power is conceived as a theory of social order – as prevailing norms or structures which generate social hierarchies, attitudes and behaviours of habitual compliance that serve to include or exclude. Power circulates everywhere, and there is no conspiracy, no agent at fault for power asymmetries and ‘nobody to shoot’ (Hayward and Lukes 2008). Oppression and discrimination – whether on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality or age – are internalised by the oppressed and the oppressors alike, as everyone conforms with or falls short of challenging what is ‘normal’.

With the lens of agency, the powerful are seen as mobilising oppressive values intentionally (e.g. with propaganda, education, the media or religious doctrine) in order to reinforce desired behaviour. Using the lens of structure, the scope for exercising will or resistance can seem fixed and limited, leaving agents all but powerless. With a multidimensional power lens, as broadly applied by the authors of this book, the conspiratorial intentions of powerful agents may or may not be obvious, but political responsibility can be found and resisted (Hayward and Lukes 2008: 11; see McGee this volume); and it is also possible to identify the underlying values these actors seek to amplify, and to develop effective forms of resistance and alternatives to these norms. Structures are not deterministic, inscribing themselves on subjects, nor are subjects free from the constraints of their social context. Forms of agency and structure continually interact, or indeed work holistically to sustain or subvert systems of power; and power can be destabilised or created anew through collective awareness and through the articulation and enactment of alternatives. Social change in this view is a long-term, incremental and strategic process for activists and movements, reaching beyond episodic protest and advocacy, though it can also be marked by highly visible and unruly moments of rupture.

These views of power as ‘constitutive of society’ (Clegg and Haugaard 2009: 3), transcending structure and agency, can be described as post-structural. Analysts of civic and political power often downplay or disregard these dimensions of power, except insofar as they are acknowledged as part of the cultural or institutional backdrop. Analysis focuses on what can be seen: agents, their stated or imputed interests, and their alliances and conflicts as they compete for influence and power – the actors, political processes and institutions ‘above the waterline’ (Pettit and Mejía Acosta 2014). Lenses of political economy are well suited for this kind of analysis, yet tend to relegate the socialised dimensions of power to ‘informal institutions’ or ‘ideology’ rather than examining how beliefs and behaviour are shaped, how fields of possibility evolve historically and how agency can be both present and pre-constrained by structure, rolled into one performance (Butler 1990). More behaviourist versions of political economy assume that actors make informed and calculated decisions in accord with their interests, without taking into account the normative pressures or negative consequences that may shape their perception of those interests and options. These approaches also fail to factor in the embodied dispositions that underlie decisions and behaviour, as increasingly recognised in psychology and cognitive science (see Pettit, this volume).

These lenses on power yield quite different understandings of ‘empowerment’. With an agency view, empowerment is often reduced to the personal acquisition of skills, abilities and resources, usually by a disadvantaged individual on an otherwise level playing field. A purely structural view implies no theory of empowerment, except perhaps a revolutionary one led by an enlightened vanguard and ideology and facilitated by the scope for shared meaning – and hence communication – inherent in social structures and systems. Seen from a post-structural and multidimensional angle, empowerment involves gaining critical awareness of structural inequalities and abilities to create, articulate and enact alternatives, usually on a collective basis (Sardenberg 2009). Given these divergent definitions, and the widespread use of empowerment to describe more instrumental approaches used by international development agencies, the authors in this volume do not always refer to the processes of transformation they describe as ‘empowerment’. We have nonetheless chosen to affirm the more collective and emancipatory meaning of empowerment in this book.

Bridging theories and practices of power

The chapters that follow are presented in four sections. Part 2 emphasises theoretical and conceptual interpretations of power in the light of current contexts and crises. The authors in Part 3 introduce key frameworks and approaches to power analysis, reflecting on their application and evolution. Part 4 explores illustrative examples of agency, resistance and social action to shift power in diverse contexts. Finally, Part 5 presents approaches to facilitating learning and unlearning for reflective social action.

Part 2 – Conceptual and theoretical groundings and debates

This offers a critical review of concepts and theories used to analyse and explain power and empowerment, many of which are referred to and applied in the chapters that follow. Lisa VeneKlasen (Chapter 2.1) vividly depicts people and systems currently locked in simultaneous and frenetic dynamics of both destructive extinction and constructive, progressive eruption, against an age-old backcloth of entrenched structural injustices. She seeks ‘rearview innovations’ in her historical review of experience of feminist organisers and movement-builders, setting out how the ‘invited spaces’ for democratic engagement in policy processes in the 1990s and 2000s diverted activists from their claimed and autonomous spaces of protest, and depoliticised their repertoires. More recently, as corporate capitalism and patriarchy have dug in, extractivism has hollowed out livelihoods and violence and crisis have become normalised, activists – among them VeneKlasen’s own organisation, Just Associates (JASS) – have regrouped and focused on movement-building. JASS always focused on building women’s power within and power with in personal and intimate spaces to engage in ‘power for’ in more public and overtly political arenas. The foremost challenge JASS activists confront today is the way hidden and shadow powers – private corporate interests, organised crime, fundamentalist groups and others – wield growing, unaccountable and illegitimate influence over public institutions and resources, with states’ open collusion. As power complexifies and democratic spaces close in on even mainstream and technocratic social actors, women are often publicly leading the charge against right-wing reactionary and populist political regimes. Part of JASS’s own reflective and empowering practice is to name these trends, pinpoint the contradictions of power and redouble its historic attention to exposing narratives of domination and constructing critical and transformative counter-narratives.

Patta Scott-Villiers (Chapter 2.2) continues the theme of the colonisation by the market, as well as the totalising power of commodification and bureaucratisation. She points to the ways in which the competitive and divisive influence of competitive individualism is reshaping agency and our understandings of it, creating political subjects through what Foucault (2007) calls discipline and governmentality, and Haugaard (2012) calls the fourth dimension of power. As an antidote, Scott-Villiers explores communitas, a generic, culturally transcendental and unstructured form of human bonding between equals that underpins experiences of resistance and unruly politics, flying in the face of individualisms and nationalisms. Communitas, she argues, is an under-explored field of power which can help renew contemporary social rebuilding. Unruliness is a particular approach to unsettling normal power and freeing the ‘negative communities’ of despairing individuals trapped in it. Protests and aesthetic ruptures, prominent in unruly repertoires, are ephemeral, disruptive and often ecstatic in quality, yet powerful. In fleeting liminal states in which social order is undone by people letting go of it, communities of people grow and learn, and when the moment passes those who felt it are left with the enduring experience of communitas. If sustained in political action that is faithful to the momentary event and bonds of communitas, these experiences can be transformative. While everything and everyone is caught up in the global web of tech-led cultural reconfiguration that is termed ‘digimodernism’, the power of communitas also shapes it. As resistance emerges in event after event of political truth around the world, communitas offers new ways to understand how transformative political power can work towards a common good.

Unruliness can be seen as breaking those ‘networks of social boundaries’ that are power in Hayward (1998)’s post-structural sense. In Chapter 2.3 Rosemary McGee engages with this perspective in applying a power lens to the claiming of accountability for rights and entitlements. Her starting position is that we need to understand power so as to exact accountability, and the project of exacting accountability is a project of transforming power: their relationship is key in the quest for more effective ways of holding power to account. The chapter discusses different versions of accountability-claiming, using a range of theoretical standpoints. Those based on first- and second-dimensional, agency-focused understandings of power seek out the culpable agents and provide the accountability-seekers with information as a panacea for adjusting the power equation in the latter’s favour, or to uncover and adjust practices of elite capture in public programmes. Those that have deep and long-term effects, however, are based on third- and fourth-dimensional understandings. These adopt multifaceted strategies to tackle, over years and decades, oppressive so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• PART 1: Introduction
• PART 2: Conceptual and theoretical groundings and debates
• PART 3: Analysing power and empowerment: frameworks and approaches
• PART 4: Understanding agency: social action for shifting power
• PART 5: Unlearning and learning power for reflective social change
• Index