Power

A critical concern is that of power, control and influence - how are the practices of impact evaluation shaped, and who shapes them, in any given specific situation? This is likely to be a rather unclear, difficult to ascertain, area of evaluation, with social and political consequences. However, in order to understand what evaluations are for, what they accomplish, and for who, how they might succeed or fail in this sense, we have to understand the power dynamics.

Power dynamics - Image 1 "In beneficiary communities alone"

In this blog I intend to look at how we might approach power relations and how we might apply them to impact evaluations, not only in beneficiary communities, but beyond that zone alone.

I plan to look at power in different guises, for example including short articles on:

• Definitions of power
• Power in traditional evaluations - ie power dynamics specifically in target communities
• Power in evaluation networks - ie power dynamics across networked stakeholders
• Power in international development - including 3 types identified by Cathy Shutt
• Approaches to power: 
• Marxist perspectives on power
• Foucauldian resources to understand power
• Gramsci's view of power
• Habermas view of power in a defense of the enlightenment
• Actor networks - enrolment, translation, mediation
• Activity Theory - contested ZPDs, fragmented objects of practice, knotworks
• Power embedded into techniques, technologies and territories