More and more organisations are getting behind the idea of community power as a solution to local issues. But one internationally respected researcher thinks the enthusiasm is not being met with sufficient analysis of how power is formed and whether there are any negatives in the process.
That researcher is Jennie Popay, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Lancaster University in the UK. We speak to Jennie in the latest episode of our podcast series on community power, which you can find on Ratio’s website and Apple podcasts.
Jennie’s view is that despite decades of initiatives in which communities were ‘empowered’ to improve their lives, the impact has not been that big. An easy measure of this is the growing social inequity in many countries. So, what’s going on?
Her view is that so-called ‘empowerment’ initiatives have tended to ask residents to think about their local conditions and accrue the ‘capacities’ required to change them. Good though this may be, what it doesn’t do is address how those conditions came about – i.e., the political and social forces that gave rise to them.
Jennie calls the focus on conditions and capacities an inward gaze. Her view is that this approach effectively burdens residents with the responsibility to put right what political and social forces have got wrong. It would be more legitimate, she and her colleagues argue in their recent article in Health Promotion International, if residents were ‘empowered’ to address the aforementioned forces – in other words to adopt an outward gaze.
You’ll have noticed that I have put inverted commas around the words empowerment and empowered. According to Jennie, the term is problematic because it assumes that communities do not have power. As she says in the episode (Ratio/Apple), it’s the language of deficits – it focuses on what communities are assumed not to have, essentially looking down on them. But in her view, communities always have power; whether it can act depends on whether it’s being limited.
To help practitioners and researchers think about that, she and her colleagues proposed the Limiting Power Framework in the aforementioned article. It essentially lists the things that can restrict communities, separating them into four groups – compulsory (formal instruments of the state), institutional (rules, procedures and norms), structural (biases that sustain social hierarchies) and productive (narratives that legitimise some and delegitimise others).
If these restrictions could be suppressed, the power of communities would be released – ‘released’ being the word that Jennie prefers over ‘empowerment’ or ‘empowered’.
Some of you may think that this is semantics. I don’t think it is. If community power is a solution to the growing inequities in society, we need clarity on how it’s released – including what might be limiting it.
Another way in which Jennie and her colleagues have tried to provide that clarity is in how you might measure how a group of people come together to release their power. In their follow-up article in Health Promotion International, they describe qualitative ‘markers’ for this process, such as growing agreement amongst members over shared values, growing recognition that to achieve something requires alliances outside of the community, and the emergence of structures through which community members can exert influence over decision-making.
The work of Jennie and her colleagues makes it possible for practitioners and researchers to be more intentional and thoughtful. But in all this, there is a danger of assuming that the process by which communities form and release their power is always positive. Can that be true?
Jennie and her colleagues have been looking at that and their preliminary analysis of a long-term ‘empowerment’ initiative showed that the benefits – in this case mental wellbeing – were greater amongst men and people with higher socioeconomic status. This suggests that initiatives designed to release the power of communities should pay special attention to the potentially negative impact on women and people of lower socioeconomic status.
I find Jennie’s work rigorous, insightful, practical and of strategic importance. Even the briefest glimpse at her publication record illustrates her embrace of systems theory, gender equality, epistemic justice, better methods for research, and an unashamed empathy for people living in difficult circumstances. In the few conversations I’ve had with her, I sense someone that believes in community self-determination but is not blinded by the ideology. To be frank, I don’t think that can be said of many scholars in the field.
In our next episode, Michael Little, the host of the podcast, talks to Paul Speer, a former community organiser who now conducts research on organizing, social power and community change. But, for now, I’ll leave you to enjoy the unparalleled insights of Jennie Popay (Ratio/Apple).
See you in two weeks.
Pritpal S Tamber
PS: To learn more about Ratio’s work, sign up for their newsletter or drop them a line: [email protected].
Previous Episodes in the Series
- Episode 2 (November 1): A conversation with Jonathan Heller, one of the most innovative practitioners in the journey to health equity (Ratio/Apple)
- Episode 1 (October 17): Pritpal S Tamber talks to Michael Little, the host of the podcast, on what community power is and why it might be important (Ratio/Apple)
Further Reading
- The Limiting Power Framework draws on Barnett and Duvall’s 2005 article on how power is inadequately conceptualised and Gaventa’s 2009 article on the nature of power relationships in citizen engagement
- Jennie and colleagues have published a third article in Health Promotion International on the role of ‘participatory spaces’ in power shifting
- They have also been involved in a programme called the Neighbourhood Resilience Programme, which sought to understand how to shift local power dynamics to improve the social determinants of health inequalities that are amenable to local action
- Through the above programme, they proposed a new model called neighbourhood system resilience that widened the concept of community from just residents to include the people that work or provide services there
- In the podcast, Jennie mentions a multimedia evaluation of the long-term ‘empowerment’ initiative. The initiative is also mentioned in the post above. It’s called Big Local and the evaluation is essentially a series of videos from some of the places involved
- In my work, I’ve built on Jennie’s 2006 model linking community engagement and health improvement to present a new version informed by my review of the biomedical evidence (the new version is modified further in a forthcoming article in the December 5, 2022, issue of Health Affairs – sign up for my newsletter to receive news about this)
The credit for the image behind the title is: Gary Waters / Ikon Images.
From 2013 to 2026, I explored the link between community, power and health. I started when I was the Physician Editor of TEDMED. This website lists my projects, publications and posts. Find me on LinkedIn.