Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller
Summary
Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller are American civic-society researchers and practitioners; co-authors of A New Weave of Power, People & Politics: The Action Guide for Advocacy and Citizen Participation (2002, 2007), in which they developed the power-over / power-with / power-within / power-to framework — the standard NGO/advocacy toolkit for thinking about what kind of power the campaign is trying to build.
Key idea in this wiki
- The four-powers framework is the wiki’s working typology of what kind of power the campaign is trying to build: power-over (domination, the most common frame of power); power-with (collective power, the wiki’s preferred organising frame); power-within (individual power, the relational-organising frame); and power-to (creative power, the capacity-to-act frame); the Nonviolence International tactics database treats the four-powers typology as one of its standard reference frames for advocacy practitioners [source: nonviolence-international-tactics].
- The framework underwrites the wiki’s power-mapping and volunteer-management concept pages’ emphasis on power-with and power-within as the campaign’s primary power-building targets.
- The just-associations project that VeneKlasen and Miller subsequently developed extends the framework to governance and association-building; the wiki’s coalition-building concept applies this discipline.
Why campaigners read them
Campaigners read VeneKlasen and Miller because A New Weave of Power, People & Politics (2002; second edition 2007) gives the NGO/advocacy tradition its working four-powers typology: power-over (domination — the framework’s most-cited but most-criticised form), power-with (collective power — the wiki’s organising pillar’s preferred frame), power-within (individual power — the relational-organising frame that I can act), and power-to (creative power — the capacity-to-act frame) [source: nonviolence-international-tactics]. The Nonviolence International tactics database treats the typology as one of its standard reference frames for advocacy practitioners [source: nonviolence-international-tactics]. The wiki uses VeneKlasen-Miller in power-mapping (the four-powers typology alongside Lukes’s three-faces), in volunteer-management (the power-within frame for relational-organising), and in coalition-building (the just-associations governance-discipline extension). The wiki pairs VeneKlasen-Miller with steven-lukes and john-gaventa as the three-thinker power-analysis and advocacy-craft canon.
Related
- power-mapping
- volunteer-management
- organizing
- leadership-development
- coalition-building
- strategy
- thinkers/john-gaventa
- thinkers/steven-lukes
Learn more
- On Wikipedia → Civil society — CC BY-SA 4.0 (the broader topic their four-powers framework speaks to; no dedicated Wikipedia article for VeneKlasen or Miller)
Open Questions
- The power-over / power-with / power-within / power-to framework has been critiqued in political theory since 2002; the wiki treats it as a useful practitioner typology rather than as a settled empirical claim.
Sources & verification
- [new-weave-power-people-politics](sourcing target — source page pending) — primary work, link-only
- [just-associations](sourcing target — source page pending) — secondary reference