Power is everywhere. The question is what actors do with it.
In the Playbook, power is the ability to shape what others can do. It flows through relationships. It shapes what is possible, permissible and rewarded – and therefore the patterns a landscape produces.
Pastoralism makes the power relationship visible.
Training in rangeland management cannot restore mobility if access to grazing has been closed. Likewise, credit that requires an individual land title can exclude pastoralists who hold land collectively. The full reading uses these examples to show why skills alone cannot change a practice when access and authority remain unchanged.
Power is the substance of what happens between actors.
Power is not an extra layer added after technical analysis. It is already present in access, information, legitimacy, material resources, rules, practices and the ability to make decisions hold.
Power operates through influence exerted and received. Feedback can dampen action, reinforce it or redirect it.
Ask how far an actor’s influence extends. A decision made outside the landscape may be strongly present within it.
Many light strandsHeavy and light strands: A strand is heavy when its practices strongly shape other strands; a light strand has less influence in return. Weight concerns influence, not the importance or worth of the people involved. can align and generate collective regulatory weight that none holds alone.
The intervention arrives with money, legitimacy and convening power. Its own regulatory effect must be read deliberately.
Accumulation fragments. Sharing integrates.
All actors have agency. The distinction is whether regulatory capacity is concentrated and directed one way, or distributed so that actors can influence one another.
Power accumulation
Power accumulation bends the system towards the accumulator’s interests. It can generate amplifying loops: dispossession increases desperation, desperate practices increase degradation, and punitive responses leave the underlying distribution intact.
Do not assume that changing behaviour will change the power arrangement sustaining it. Identify who benefits from the current pattern and how they may resist.
Read the power landscape before you design.
A power analysis is not a ranking of important people. It is a reading of regulatory exchange: who can affect whom, through what mechanisms, at what range and with what effect.
Power enters practice through meanings, materials and competencies.
When a practice does not change, ask whether the people involved are actually free to act differently.
Who defines what is legitimate, modern, productive or backward? Whose knowledge counts?
Who controls land, water, finance, infrastructure, permits, markets and the resources needed to act?
Whose skills are recognized? Who controls credentials, expertise and the ability to put knowledge into practice?
Build collective regulatory capacity rather than simply transferring accumulation from one elite to another.
Follow the relationships.
Read the full Power chapter.
The full reading provides the conceptual foundations, examples, sources and methodological detail behind this page.
Terms used on this page
- Strand
- An actor group and the practices through which it shapes the landscape over time.
- Heavy and light strands
- A strand is heavy when its practices strongly shape other strands; a light strand has less influence in return. Weight concerns influence, not the importance or worth of the people involved.
- Heading
- The direction in which the landscape is currently moving, produced by many actors and their interactions.
- Regulation
- Any way actors shape what others can or cannot do, including rules, money, prices, custom and persuasion. It is broader than government regulation.
