A seat at the table
is not the same as power
John Gaventa’s power cube, made clickable. Three dimensions, nine categories: where a decision gets made, at which level, and whether the power involved is visible at all. Open any category for the Indian evidence, with the source and year given.
Eight documented Indian cases are plotted on all three dimensions at once, further down.
The cube belongs to John Gaventa, from “Finding the Spaces for Change: A Power Analysis”, IDS Bulletin 37(6), 2006, building on Steven Lukes. ImpactMojo added the Indian evidence. Full credits ↓
Three questions, asked together
Gaventa’s argument is that the three dimensions only work read as a set. A seat in an invited local space counts for little when the decision was taken at another level, in a form nobody can see. Answering one question and stopping is how power analysis goes wrong.
What the cube cannot do
The bottom face is the hardest to evidence. Invisible power is a claim about what people have internalised, and the figures on this page are consistent with that reading without proving it. A norm someone accepts and a constraint they cannot escape look identical in survey data.
Hidden power has the same problem in a milder form. The disciplined version names a specific issue kept off the table and who gains from its absence. The undisciplined version explains everything and predicts nothing.
The cube also says nothing about who you are. It maps how power operates, not who it operates on. The Wheel covers that, and the Ladder covers how much of it moved.
Nine categories, each with its evidence
Tap a slice of the cube, or use the buttons under it. Every category has its own shareable link.
Eight Indian cases, on all three dimensions
The same case reads differently on each face, which is the point of using a cube rather than a list.
Whose cube this is
Finding the Spaces for Change
John Gaventa, Institute of Development Studies. The three dimensions, the nine categories and the argument that they must be read together are his.
IDS Bulletin 37(6), 2006 · teaching resources at powercube.net, run by IDS
What it builds on
Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (1974), for the three dimensions of power, and Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller (2002) for the visible, hidden and invisible formulation.
What ImpactMojo added
The interactive cube, 23 pieces of Indian evidence across the nine categories, and eight documented Indian cases plotted on all three dimensions, each with a named source and year.
ImpactMojo, 2026 · content CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · code MIT