Where the power lies: multiple stakeholder politics over natural ...

The central challenge of analysing power relations is to identify units of joint and separate
interests; particularly networks or alliances of interests and within and across these to
identify important social criteria to define how the identities of each stakeholder are
constructed (Villareal 1992). As our intention is to understand the causes, connections
and consequences of power processes, we have to look very closely at
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‘the everyday lives of stakeholders, explore the small ordinary issues that take place
in different contexts, and show how compliance, adaptation and also resistance and
open struggle are generated. In this endeavour we shall find no strong, visible
manifestations of power. Rather we have to look for small flashes of command that
may peek out from behind the screens…. I claim that power is of a fluid nature that
fills up spaces, sometimes for only flickering moments and takes different forms and
constituencies, which makes it difficult to measure, but conspicuous enough to
describe’ (Villarreal 1992:258).
For example, bargaining within the household is often covert, involving emotional
manipulation and unspoken power games, often involving bargaining on behalf of others—
especially, but not only, children—all of which makes both the processes and outcomes
difficult to detect (Locke et al. 1998).
Within a particular group of stakeholders, one can observe a variety of relations. These
relations are not always played out in public. Rather, some may be hidden from view and
occur in places or at times rarely accessible to an observer. For example, one field
worker working in Romwe, observed that jostling among stakeholders rarely if ever
happens in public. He notes that for the group he works with,
“if you are talking about decision making you are focusing on who participates in
making that decision. For example, in a home, it will be a discussion between
family members, but recommendations, summaries and statements of intent are
issued by the head of the household. Even in a simple interaction like interviewing
a household, though husband consults wife, he makes the last statement which is
recorded. Public decision making is about posturing and often does not tell you
about the dynamics preceding the decision. This is why it is dangerous and
sometimes misleading to talk about decision making as being a monopoly of this
stakeholder or that group or to say that what you see in these public meetings is
the real dynamics between stakeholders. Sometimes the meeting happens long
after the real jostling has occurred and decisions have been made” (Romwe field
Notes, 06-01-2001).
However, there are some instances when the observed dynamics within a group of
stakeholders in public are real and represent the final jostling before a decision is reached.
Therefore, sometimes when one observes dynamics in public fora such as meetings one
is never sure whether what one is witnessing is an end of or the beginning of a process of
negotiations and bargaining.
Relations among stakeholders are never as simple as they appear. If each stakeholder is
considered as having a social horizon, then one would note that most horizons extend
well beyond the stakeholder, the group, the organization where they come from; the
society they are part of; sometimes the donors that fund them, etc. This horizon would
include everyone that stakeholder maintains continuous relations with, especially relations
of cooperation or dependence. Thus, to understand power there is need to think about
stakeholders as purposively creating identities that allow them to draw on many sources