Diagram of triangle with 3 circles on each corner with each circle pointing an arrow to the centre of the triangle. In each triangle there is a word. They read 'Content, Structure, Culture'. The Title underneath the diagram reads 'The Triangle Framework'. The diagram is on a crumpled piece of white paper.

Frameworks for Engaging with Visible Power

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Introduction

Two frameworks for assessing the different kinds of policy and political spaces activists can engage in or create to effect change. 

These frameworks are explained in Just Power: A Guide for Activists and Changemakers by JASS Just Associates. The excerpt below is from Chapter 6: Power and Strategy – Theme 5: Engaging and Resisting.

Engaging and Resisting

Policy and legal advocacy – focused on visible power – tend to dominate public perceptions about how change happens.

In many contexts, engaging with, reforming, and using the mechanisms of formal decision-making – whether through government, corporate, civil society, trade union, or religious structure (among many other examples) – remains a critical tool for influencing and changing power.

Policy and advocacy efforts may be strategic in specific moments or contexts, but not always.

Some movements choose not to get involved in formal lobbying or advocacy directed at governments and to focus instead on shifting power in other arenas, such as generating new narratives, investing in political education that challenges the dominant norms and beliefs of invisible power, building their own alternatives, creating autonomous communities – self-defined and self-governing groups – or resisting through protests, marches and occupations.

For example:

  • Occupy Wall Street activists in the US and beyond chose to disengage from policy work because addressing inequality was not even on the policy agenda in any meaningful way. Their goal was to use a visible encampment in the midst of the financial district in New York city to expose the realities of who capitalism serves (the 1%) – and rally the 99% to get economic inequality and justice on the agenda.
  • Autonomous actions and spaces organised by activists and movements have produced liberated zones and sovereign communities throughout history, such as the anarchist collectives in Spain and the Zapatistas in Southern Mexico, various kinds of commons and communitarian governance, workers’ collectives, and self-defined solidarity economies and community spaces. Autonomous community-building has led to policy change and state engagement through smart media and narrative strategies such as in the cases of the Zapatistas, Cooperation Jackson in the US, the transboundary indigenous water governance in the Coast Salish Sea, and the Arvari River Parliament in India.
  • In the case study PEKKA: Marginalised women organise in Indonesia, autonomous spaces became the foundation for building cooperatives that enabled women to organise and gain collective economic and political influence.

A key element of strategy is to determine if, how, and when to engage with visible power. However, not all opportunities to engage are strategic.

Numerous other manuals detail how to conduct lobbying and advocacy. Here, we offer tools for deciding whether to engage, and also when to resist – either instead of engaging, or in a combination through ‘inside-outside’ strategies.

Aligning advocacy strategies with mass mobilisations can create pressure on decision-makers and shift narratives so that allies ‘on the inside’ can highlight the costs of inaction and create more receptivity, making lobbying easier.

‘Inside-outside strategies’ combine actions within the halls of power and outside the doors simultaneously. The combination of street action and social media, for example, can turn up the heat on political and economic decisionmakers and forces.

The Triangle Framework

This three-way analysis guides where and how to focus visible power strategies.

It divides visible power into two domains – Content and Structure – and considers how these are influenced by Culture, the invisible power of norms and beliefs.

This framework overlaps in some ways with the four arenas of power. It is taken from VeneKlasen, Lisa and Valerie Miller, (2002),A New Weave of Power, People and Politics, Practical Action Publishing, pgs. 170-174.

Content

What’s written in and what’s deliberately left out of laws, policies, budgets, and the rules, and who are the people in charge of making those rules. Bias and discrimination are reinforced by what’s there and what’s not there when rights aren’t recognised, and by who gets to decide.

Structure

The interpretation, implementation, and enforcement, of those rules by judges, police, military, legislators, civil servants and managers – the people and institutions responsible for implementing the rules, regulations and standards, along with their enforcement mechanisms and implementers.

All too often, these are biased and serve the interests of those in power. This is why many organisations seek to retrain judges and police as part of their change strategies.

Holding decisionmakers to account is critical, to ensure that policies are created and implemented in a way that serves the people most affected. Even when a decent law exists, biased police or judges serving the interests of those in power tend to reinforce injustice.

Culture

The norms, values, beliefs and traditions that can either justify or upend inequality and injustice. Artistic and creative expressions – music, art, dance – can mirror, reinforce, or disrupt these beliefs.

By precisely locating how the Content and the Structure contribute to injustice – and potentially, to addressing a key aspect of that injustice – the triangle can help sharpen strategies that engage and use visible or formal power for change.

The framework is a reminder that changing laws and elections – examples of strategies to reform governments – can advance our justice values without fundamentally shifting the underlying norms and beliefs that uphold power.

Integral aspects of engaging visible power, therefore, can include narratives that affirm our power together, educating and organising people to claim their rights, and demanding that the system treat people with dignity and fairness.

Spaces of Power Framework

All spaces where policy decisions and issues are being discussed are political and contested.

When people, activists, and civil society groups are invited by officials to ‘engage’ in formal policy processes, it’s worth assessing whether and how to do so, and when to consider the power of claiming and creating autonomous spaces.

Policy engagement may not make sense as the most strategic use of your resources and time in all moments and contexts.

Being strategic is not simply a question of whether you can impact policy or its enforcement. Sometimes, engaging with global, state, corporate, civic or religious actors can be an opportunity for new alliances, gathering information, gaining clout or shifting the agenda.

But is it worth the necessary investment in resources, preparation, and credibility to engage in these spaces? What other spaces can be claimed, created or strengthened to build your power and influence?

For the past few decades, activists have used versions of this framework to assess the different kinds of policy and political spaces they can engage in or create to effect change. 

The framework helps groups to analyse the potential opportunities and entry points for engagement and resistance in terms of how decisions are made and whether participation is ‘strategic’ in four kinds of spaces.

Closed Spaces

A closed space is controlled by an elite group of decisionmakers by virtue of their position or appointment; it is usually neither transparent nor open to public participation.

Examples include legislative committees, councils, and spaces for making security, trade, and corporate policy.

Strategic considerations

  • Are the decisions made in this space vital to your change agenda?
  • Can this space be influenced through advocacy, shareholder or electoral campaigns?
  • Is it possible to use exposure strategies (revealing leaked information) or to mobilise outside pressure and resistance to demand transparency or participation?

Invited Spaces

An invited space is created by policymakers who want to engage civil society groups (under pressure or for other reasons) in consultation.

Usually, the agenda, who participates and how remains tightly controlled. Policymakers can use these spaces for meaningful input but more often to create a veneer of legitimacy and democracy. Examples include the UN climate talks, Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) annual meetings, and participatory processes at different levels convened by public or private agencies.

Strategic considerations

  • Considering the financial costs of participating in a policy space (including preparation), will the opportunity strengthen relationships with insiders, advance the agenda, create an opportunity to build alliances, educate leaders on the process, and/or move your agenda forward?
  • When activists choose to participate, their presence may be as useful or more so to the powerholders convening the space than to the activists themselves or their agenda. Will your agenda be co-opted for a purpose that you don’t support?
  • Conversely, however, it can be useful to gather information, network, and gain visibility and voice in an invited space.

Claimed Spaces

A claimed space, by contrast, is created by civil society or informal groups specifically to challenge and question the legitimacy of a closed or invited space and in order to engage with decision-makers around the civic group’s agenda, not that of decision-makers.

Examples are a parallel conference or an autonomous space with or alongside a UN conference, the COP meetings, the World Economic Forum (Davos), or other officially convened processes.

Strategic considerations

  • Will the strategies to claim a parallel space communicate clearly to decision-makers that their agenda and their engagement with civil society is inadequate?
  • Will a claimed space help build your alliances and consensus around demands and propositions and serve as leverage in advocacy and strategic communications aimed at the policy process you’re claiming space from?
  • Can you invite some decisionmakers to join you?

Created Spaces

Created spaces are autonomous spaces defined by civil society, such as the World Social Forum or local or national alliances where the agenda and who participates are entirely in the hands of activists and change makers.

These are spaces in which to exchange ideas, build solidarity, and forge common visions, values and agendas to connect movements and change makers across borders informally and formally.

Strategic considerations

  • Is this a moment in which we face such great divisive forces and siloing that we need to shift our resources and energy to creating our own spaces in order to forge an alternative agenda for the future?
  • Can we create and sustain our own processes of alliances and resistance while also influencing and engaging with formal power-holders?

Key Strategies and Opportunities to Engage and Use

Key strategies and opportunities to ‘engage and use’ visible power include:

  • Litigation
  • Lobbying and advocacy to change laws
  • Elections and appointments of key decision-makers, judges, commissioners, etc.
  • Media strategies to expose corruption and make the case
  • Generating alternative research and policy proposals
  • Utilising commissions to make the case
  • Action research and participatory consultations around laws, referenda, etc.
  • Pressing for accountability and funding for existing laws or policies
  • Budget tracking
  • Training and ‘sensitising’ civil servants, managers, or implementers
  • Using regional and global human rights mechanisms to draw attention to violations and expose abuses, create pressure

When the context is too risky to directly challenge actors at the local or country level, exposing the corporate actor or state actor by focusing on an angle involving the international financial institutions, bilateral agencies, and the UN human rights system.

Ingredients for Engage and Reform Strategies

Ingredients for successful ‘engage and reform’ strategies include:

  • Access and relationships with selected allies on the ‘inside’ of formal structures
  • Allies with professional expertise (such as lawyers for litigation or policy advocates)
  • Quality research to gather information (for example, participatory action research to raise awareness and organise communities, as well as generating information)
  • A clear focus and case to be made, actionable by decision-makers
  • Visibility and support from ‘outside’
  • Connections to journalists and effective digital and media strategies
  • Targeting and putting pressure on international financial institutions or corporations that may be more sensitive to public exposure than national governments are
  • Using human rights mechanisms and spaces for leverage and attention, and to build alliances

Even when focused on specific laws and policies, it is important to align the allies and strategies working on all the arenas of power simultaneously, in order to create pressure and build broader public support and constituencies.

Spaces of Power exist across many different levels, from the local to the global. The Power Cube is a useful three-dimensional tool for exploring the interaction of power, spaces, and levels, and the implications for joining up strategies for change across these dimensions.

Activities

The chapter has activities where you can explore the frameworks further.

Activity 8: Triangle analysis
Activity 9: To engage or not?
Activity 10: Inside–outside strategies
Activity 11: Why and how to resist

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