From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

ANNEX HOW CHANGE HAPPENSmeetings, speaker tours, petitions, posters, and demonstrations inperhaps the first mass campaign that would be recognisable to today’sactivists. Over the next 250 years, their actions inspired mass movementsfor women’s suffrage and for the right to form a trade union,and for numerous other struggles and campaigns that continue toshape the modern world and the lives and possibilities of its people.Mass campaigning, however, is only one source of change. Not allchange is consciously pursued: the inventors of barbed wire did notforesee that its impact on troop mobility would contribute to thehorrors of trench warfare in the First World War. Nor is it achievedonly by political activism. New technologies, from lightbulbs to theInternet; the demographic trends of ageing or urbanisation; the boomand bust of the commodity trade; the spread of literacy; and the slowgrind of political change, punctuated by the sudden ‘tipping points’ ofwar and rebellion, all contribute to Heraclitus’s vision of constantupheaval.Nor is all change positive, of course. History is studded withcollapses, pogroms, and disasters, many of which involve the samekinds of actors and dynamics as those changes normally deemed to beprogressive. Indeed, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 could be seen as aparticularly barbaric version of the combination of active citizens andeffective states that so often drives national change. Sometimes what ismost notable is the lack of change – countries, groups of people,or processes that ‘get stuck’ while the rest of the world changesaround them.The various actors in the drama can be studied to explain whychange is absent as well as present. Change is intimately bound upwith power. The many dimensions of power (power over others,power to act, ‘power with’ in the form of collective organisation, and‘power within’ – self-confidence and a sense of legitimacy) determinethe nature of the interaction between the different components ofchange. Power determines who wins, and how: peacefully or not,legally or not, enduringly or not. Achieving change is often aboutshifting the balance of power between different players, and positivechange often involves shifting it in favour of poor people and theirorganisations.433