Power: What it is, why it matters and how to make it visible

January 2026
By Sierra Deutsch

The importance of attending to power in global research partnerships cannot be overstated. This is particularly true in transdisciplinary collaborations that include non-academic actors and knowledges. But it also applies to everyday interactions that influence how researchers think about their work, understand a particular problem, decide on which problem(s) to focus on, which experts to rely on, and which outcomes to aim for.

What is ‘power’?

Power - broadly defined as the capacity to “make or receive any change, or to resist it” (Lukes, 2005, p. 69) - has long been a subject of much scholarly interest and debate, as well as an important focal point for fighting injustice. Perhaps one of the most well-known summaries of these debates is Steven Lukes’ Power: A Radical View (2005) where he describes one-, two-, and three-dimensional views of power, with each dimension adding a layer of depth.

• In the simplest one-dimensional view, power is when Person A gets Person B “to do something that B would otherwise not do” (Dahl, 1957, p. 203). In this view, power is easily observable, intentional, and has concrete effects, for example, as decisions and rules.
• The two-dimensional view adds that power can also act to prevent dissent from being voiced. Here, power may or may not be observable and/or intentional as it operates through control of whose perspectives, values, and worldviews are granted consideration in societies, for example in making decisions and rules.
• The third-dimensional view goes deeper still, by adding that power also operates by prioritizing certain values, narratives, and knowledge in such a way that they shape people’s beliefs and preferences, and therefore their realities.

In this view, “power should not be conceived narrowly as requiring intention” (Lukes, 2005, p. 68), but rather as a property of a particular society. And as Foucault (1978, p. 93) argues, “(p)ower is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” and does not necessarily need to be exercised with awareness to produce effects (Foucault, 1982, 1978). Indeed, power operates most efficiently when it is not observable, so that its effects appear as natural, logical, and/or inevitable, and alternative realities, pathways, and solutions therefore unimaginable. For example, the idea of ‘human nature’ (especially as greedy and selfish), the primacy of technocratic scientific knowledge, and the belief that our globalized profit-oriented market economy is ‘natural’ or inevitable have been well-established by many critical social scientists (those who grapple with fundamental questions about societal power dynamics) as being shaped by particular systems of power (e.g. Frantz Fanon, Silvia Federici, Michel Foucault, Aníbal Quijano, Vandana Shiva, Catherine Walsh, and many, many more).

Why focus on power?

Ethical motivations: Few people would argue that people and societies should not correct injustices and there are many important efforts to ameliorate the symptoms of injustice. Yet, many forms of injustice are not unfortunate and static states of being. In other words, they do not exist only today and only by happenstance. In most cases, they have developed through long and complex histories of oppression, exploitation, and manipulation of individual and collective (systems of) power. Thus, injustices cannot simply be undone by addressing immediate circumstances alone. Instead, the hidden power dynamics that drive injustices must be identified as a first step towards just (and sustainable) societies.

Pluralizing knowledges: Often global research partnerships engage in transformative research, in which they are intentionally aiming for societal change. Such change, not only but especially if it hopes to address historically embedded injustices, must necessarily engage deeply with multiple forms of theoretical, experiential, embodied, and practical knowledge and creativity (Brandt et al., 2013). To do this, many argue that we must understand technocratic scientific knowledge as representing particular interests and therefore that “politics resides not just in society but also in science; the production of knowledge is itself political in the sense that it is shaped by values and has political consequences” (Turnhout and Lahsen, 2022, p. 837). Here, despite the existence of ‘other’ knowledge systems which also rely on well-established knowledge validation procedures, power shapes reality in such a way that technocratic scientific knowledge is viewed as the only form of knowledge that is not political and is therefore the only form of legitimate knowledge. As a result, knowledge systems that don’t support the (market economy-driven) paradigm of individualism and hierarchies (e.g. Indigenous Peoples’, local, and practical knowledge systems), and may therefore embody precisely the worldviews needed for societal change, are restricted from contributing to understandings of a problem and its solutions. Understanding how power operates allows us to work towards holding knowledge systems in parity by highlighting that technocratic scientific knowledge is also political, in the sense that it is one form of knowledge among many, each representing particular values, interests, knowledge validation systems, and ways of understanding the world.

More holistic understandings of the problem lead to more robust solutions: Importantly, this ‘re-politicizing’ of technocratic scientific knowledge does not negate its contributions to knowledge more generally. Rather, it creates space for exploring complex problems more deeply. In point of fact, the very concept of ‘power’ is an excellent example of this. Initially, the perspectives of women, enslaved peoples, Indigenous peoples, and other colonized and marginalized populations were excluded in formal, scholarly discussions about power. Developing their understandings in more informal, less visible practices, it wasn’t until the 19th century that such perspectives began to be recognized (e.g. Frederick Douglass, Sojurner Truth, Harriet Martineau). By the mid-20th century, understandings of power were ever-expanding with more and more women (e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, Nancy Fraser, bell hooks) and people of color (e.g. Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Edward Said) entering the debates, bringing unique contributions to formal theorizations of power. Today, the richness of our understanding of power is widely attributed to the inclusion of multiple ways of studying and understanding power, which in turn is informed by multiple worldviews, perspectives, experiences, interests, and values. In most cases, this expansion of understanding did not negate original (formalized) theories of power, but rather led to a more holistic conceptualization of it (of which the original theories were just one part). Likewise, robust solutions to complex problems necessitate more holistic understandings of the problem, especially if the overall aim is societal change. But in order to address power, it needs to be visible.

How to make power visible?

Once visible, it can be hard to ‘unsee’ power. This has the effect of making it seem obvious to those who study it, regardless of how much time and effort it took to see it in the first place. And it doesn’t help that social theorists have their own language when explaining or talking about power. Natural scientists understood long ago that if they wanted to ‘translate’ (natural) science to those who had little or no experience with (natural) scientific theories and concepts, they needed to provide some tools for this. As a result, (natural) ‘science literacy’ tools - resources and strategies that help people understand natural scientific concepts, methods, and data – have been around for decades. While equivalents for critical social science surely exist in individual practices and places, a broader movement to create, collect, and share such tools is still undefined. In our SNSF-funded project ‘Translating Transformations’, we are working to fill this gap, and hoping to spark a broader movement, by creating empirically-based ‘critical social science literacy tools’ to help illuminate hidden power dynamics.

References

Brandt, P., Ernst, A., Gralla, F., Luederitz, C., Lang, D.J., Newig, J., Reinert, F., Abson, D.J., Von Wehrden, H., 2013. A review of transdisciplinary research in sustainability science. Ecol. Econ. 92, 1–15.

Dahl, R.A., 1957. The concept of power. Behav. Sci. 2, 201–215.

Foucault, M., 1982. The subject and power, in: Dreyfus, H.L., Rabinow, P. (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, p. 2nd ed. 208–226.

Foucault, M., 1978. The History of Sexuality Vol I: An Introduction, Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Random House.

Lukes, S., 2005. Power: A radical view 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan.

Turnhout, E., Lahsen, M., 2022. Transforming environmental research to avoid tragedy. Clim. Dev. 1–5.