The Hivos guidance draws a clear line between two understandings of theory of change. The first sees it as an improved logic model, better at predicting, planning, and delivering what some critics wryly call “logframe on steroids.” The second sees it as a critical, multi-stakeholder exploration of intentions, interests, and power relations, in service of social justice and equality. The difference between them condenses into a single question: change for whom, why and who says it is the change that’s needed?
This question is not an intellectual luxury. In our field, when a theory of change is written in a room where persons with disabilities are not sitting, it will inevitably carry the assumptions of those who are their assumptions about what these persons “need,” about what is “good for them.” And so the logic of charity and guardianship slips into the heart of the design, however good the intentions. “Nothing about us without us” is not a slogan raised at the closing ceremony. It is a question that must precede the first line: who was in the room when it was decided that this is the change?
Because change is, at its core, a redistribution of power, power analysis sits at the heart of any serious theory of change. VeneKlasen and Miller offer a framework distinguishing four expressions of power, and I see all four every day in our work.
There is power over power in its familiar sense: control and coercion, a win-lose relationship. There is power with the power of solidarity and joint action, where individual capacities multiply through collaboration. There is power to every person’s potential to shape their own life and world. And finally, the deepest in our work, power within a person’s sense of their own worth and dignity, their capacity to imagine and to hope.
This power within is the soil in which all self-advocacy grows. No one can claim a right before they believe they deserve it. Yet many of our programmes leap straight to external empowerment forming groups, accessing services bypassing this inner foundation. In my experience, the most successful empowerment work begins here: with a person reclaiming the sense that they are a holder of rights, not a recipient of charity. That shift, from a model of care to a model of rights, begins on the inside long before it appears in policy.
Power analysis also surfaces what we would rather not see. It is, as the guidance notes, an effective way to uncover the reasons for gaps between rhetoric and practice, between policy and implementation, between the proposed solution and the actual outcome. This can be uncomfortable, because it sometimes reveals how power is exercised within our own organizations, and how guardianship toward the very groups we serve creeps into our work. But that discomfort is precisely the sign that we are asking the right question.
A theory of change is not a technical exercise to satisfy donors. Used honestly, it is a mirror that asks power about itself: who decides? who benefits? whose voice counts? Inclusion, at its core, is justice practised, not justice announced. So before your next programme, pause on the question that comes before all others: who said this is the change that’s needed and were the people it concerns in the room when it was said?
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