Power and policy analysis

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Power and policy analysis
Power between the tie and t-shirt
Challenging the Crisis, Brussels, 7 July
2014 Dr. Momodou Sallah and Dr. Celina Del Felice
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Objetives

• Introduce power analysis tools
• Althusser
• Thompsons PCS model
• Freire
• Berger and Luckmann
• Gaventas power cube
• Explain how these tools can be applied with case
  studies
• Apply the tools to your own context

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Understanding power

• Decisional power interests
• Discursive power ideas, words, identities and
  norms
• Inseparability of interests, identities and norms

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Seduced by the defective logic challenging the
construction of normality

• Althusser (1971) Repressive State Apparatus and
  the Ideological State Apparatuses
• Berger and Luckmann (1967) construction of Social
  Reality
• Freire defective logic
• Thompsons PCS

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Althusser (1971)

• Repressive State Apparatus (e.g.Police,
  Administration, Army)
• Ideological State Apparatus (e.g. Media,
  Education and religious outlets)
• Organised vs diverse
• Hegemony through ISA

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Berger and Luckmann (1967) Construction of Social
Reality

• The world of everyday life is not only taken for
  granted as reality by the ordinary members of
  society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of
  their lives.  It is a world that originates in
  their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as
  real by these. (p 33)
• The thing we know about our world and how it
  works are not things out there in the world that
  we merely observe. Rather they were constructed
  by human meaning making (Rogers, 198926)

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Paulo Freire and the Banking Concept of Education

• Banking vs. Problem posing
• Liberation vs. domestification
• Education is political in nature
• Intransitive, semi transitive and critical
  transitivity
• One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement
  of liberation is that oppressive reality absorb
  those within it and thereby acts to submerge
  human beings consciousness (Freire 197133)

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Education is Neutral?

• There is no such thing as a neutral educational
  process. Education either functions as an
  instrument that is used to facilitate the
  integration of the younger generation into the
  logic of the present system and bring about
  conformity to it, or it becomes the practice of
  freedom, the means by which men and women deal
  critically and creatively with reality and
  discover how to participate in the transformation
  of their world (Shaull in Freire 197216)

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PCSG MODEL
G
S
C
P
Thompson (2003) PCS model PCSG (DMU YCD 2013)
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Gaventas power cube
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Invited spaces created spaces
Clarion Hotel (VII Round of Negotiations EU-CA
Association Agreement Tegucigalpa, 31 March 2009
European Parliament Brussels, 28 January 2009
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What is the power of citizen activism?

• contributes to shape the normative contents of
  global politics.
• (What is perceived as right and wrong?)
• Also economic normative contents?
• Nelson and Dorsey (2007). EJIR 13 (2) 187-216
  (new rights advocacy)
• Gold and Morin (2010). EJIR 16(4) 563587 (right
  to health and intellectural property rights

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Actions and the EPAs Campaign
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Actions in Europe and Central America
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Strategies of transnational activism

• Coordinated actions North South
• Concentrated interests with material
  capabilities (bussiness associations, trade
  unions) and diffuse interests, groups
  advocating for general societal well-being
  (environmental and development orgs)
• Mix of approaches to activism (insider and
  outsider strategies)

Picture http//www.waronwant.org/images/stories/t
rade_justice/trade_justice_homepage.jpg (Accessed
28 November 2011)
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Power in discourse
Invited spaces
Ways of acting
Challenges to markets integration
Global markets integration
Ways of representing economic reality
Created spaces
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Affecting the EU

• Surprise

• Responding

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The response of the EU
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What explains the power of these campaigns?

• Resources to mobilise and sustain advocacy over
  time
• Type of networks N-S, interests and ideas
• Mix of strategies protests and dialogue
• Discursive capacity Links to and reinforcement
  of (some) Southern governments positions

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Now its your turn

• What resources to mobilise do you have?
• What approaches to activism can you use? Prefer
  to use? What spaces can you use?
• What networks and coalitions can you build? Who
  are all the stakeholders?
• What are your ideas? How do they relate to the
  ideas of others?