A Theory of Theories of Change, Part II: The Domains of Change
Hello friends,
How does the world get better, anyways? Turns out folks have a lot of competing answers. How do you make sense of them all?
This week we continue the conversation started in August on theories of change. If you didn’t read the first post, I highly recommend going back to it so you have context for what I share below.
There will be one more post in a few weeks wrapping up the breakdown of the diagram below that I’m unpacking.
Through the fall, we’re going back and forth between these theory of change posts with a series on resisting the temptation in mysticism to diminish or denigrate the body and material creation that started with an essay called The Two Sufferings.
Let’s get to it!
Last time we looked at a set of background assumptions every theory of change holds: about the world and our place in is, what’s going wrong, and what things should be like. All this may be more or less explicit in the presentation a “Theory of Change Camp” offers (TOCC: the shorthand I’m using for all the many proposals out there on ways to “change the world/people/specific social issues”). The food pantry or political campaign recruiting you to volunteer may or may not have reflected on their theory of reality that much (some definitely have, some definitely haven’t). A therapist has probably thought a great deal about these questions on the individual and family systems level, but may or may not have thought about how these questions relate to the broader level of society (some definitely have, some definitely haven’t).
When we think of theories of change, though, usually what we have in mind isn’t any of this background stuff. What we think of are the concrete approaches people are using to make change: charity, building affordable housing, spiritual care, communities of people helping one another, mass protests taking over streets, policy advocacy, evangelism and missions, taking law suits to the Supreme Court, nonviolent direct actions, and even guerilla warfare. Each of these are ways to “change things.” But clearly they have very different assumptions behind them. Thus our attempt in Part I to bring a TOCC’s “theory of reality” up to the surface so we know why they are taking the concrete approaches they’re taking.
There’s another difference across the examples above, though. They seem to be directed at very different aspects of human life. That’s what we want to pay closer attention to this week.
Domains of Action
Domains may or may not be the best word here but let’s roll with it. What I’m trying to get at are some overarching categories that are key to the spaces of social life through which a theory of change enacts itself.
The set of domains I’m suggesting is adapted and expanded from a famous framework used in anti-racism trainings called “the four I’s of oppression.” When I first heard that training about a decade ago several things clicks in my mind. First was, wow, if racism is a sin, then this is a great breakdown of all the ways sin manifests. Sin is not just in the heart and mind (intrapersonal) or in the ways we treat one another (interpersonal). It’s also something that transcends any individuals actions by becoming incarnated in social structures, what Paul called “principalities and power” (laws; racialized wealth disparities; prison and policing; housing and educational systems; government; corporations; etc).
But if sin can operate on these levels, so can love. The same social dimensions bent toward oppression can be resurrected for love and justice.1 That, at least for me, is the goal of a theory of change: to move social life from manifestations of sin causing death to love giving life.2
Each layer or domain plays a role (implicitly or explicitly) in every theory of change. Most TOCCs, however, are going to emphasize one or two over the others. Academics get wrapped up in our paradigms (knowledge power!), evangelicals focus on the first two and (in the better settings) community. Progressives laser in on structural change, entrepreneurs try to disrupt by starting new institutions, Anabaptists and anarchists center the building of alternative communities, and so forth. As you can already see, none of these domains is inherently “conservative/right” or “liberal/left.” The domains are real parts of human life and society, and do need transformation. But the understanding of each TOCC about what is “wrong” and what the “goal” is relative to each domain will lead to vastly different strategies (again, that’s why we needed to look at their “theory of reality first” — it drives everything else).
To illustrate how this works in practice, I’ll use “poverty reduction” (a bland phrase for overthrowing racial capitalism, I agree, but this isn’t about my theory of change) as a broad category and suggest some examples in each domain below of TOCCs that focus their approach in that category. Notice that there are TOCCs from across the political spectrum with techniques focused on each domain, though political ideologies (given their theory of reality) do tend to cluster around one or another.
1. Intrapersonal
Changes in the self. Interior work including the psychological, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, habitual, and virtuous features of the self. This could include building new skills, re-forming notions of the self, healing from trauma, cultivating our capacity for empathy and relationship, excavating biases and rejecting internalized oppressions, redeveloping worldviews, developing the fruits of the Spirit in our character (to slip a Christian one in there), the contemplative journey from the True Self to the False Self, and on and on.
The intrapersonal domain raises the question: How do we or others need to change as an individual in order to achieve the world we want?
Poverty reduction TOCC examples: “rescue missions” and evangelism, recovery centers, financial literacy and life skills training, employment centers, therapeutic and trauma healing modalities, popular education that advances political consciousness and “humanizes” the oppressed toward claiming dignity/agency
2. Interpersonal
Relations between people. Where the internal elements of character and beliefs, prejudice and empathy, are expressed directly from one person to another. The interpersonal is not just about how we are in relationships, but also about who we are in relationship with. A TOCC probably has ideas about how to interact among “us” and another set of ideas about how to interact with “them” (however those lines are drawn; this could be a discriminatory us/them, or it could be those we’re in solidarity with versus those who oppose our aspirations, it could be as team/organization versus those you serve, etc.). The interpersonal asks us to consider how to relate across differences in culture, privilege, and power. It involves matters of conflict style and its resolution. It is the traditional site where sin or love occurs.
The intrapersonal domain of action raises the question: What kinds of relationships need to form for change to occur and what qualities of relational ethics do we need to practice?
Poverty reduction TOCC examples: most charities (ostensibly as intermediary of between those with more resources to those with less), workforce development and soft skills training (i.e., the poor lack behaviors needed in professional environments), community organizing relational meetings (functioning on the theory that through intentional connections we forge collective solidarity), conflict mediation (like Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs [VORP])
3. Institutional
Organizational vehicles for helping individuals work together to accomplish a goal. An institution is an entity that can take on a life of its own and gives a transpersonal continuity to ideas, communities, cultures and social projects. Institutions include businesses, prisons, city departments, nonprofits, schools, unions and houses of worship. Depending on if your definition of an institution requires it to have a legal status of existence, it could include families and some other less formal forms. The values, norms, goals, cultures, policies, procedures, and habits of groups form small systems whose operations can have huge impacts, offering a microcosm in which alternative paradigms and ways of being can be performed in the here and now even before “everything” changes, perhaps laying the groundwork for the next system to supplant the current. The French social observer Alexis de Tocqueville thought the ubiquity institutions were key to democracy in America. Sociologist Robert Putnam worries that declining participation in civil society institutions is part of democratic disintegration and the epidemic of loneliness.
The institutional domain of action raises the question: what institutions need to either be created, changed, or abolished in order to achieve the world we want?
Poverty reduction TOCC examples: community development work (lots of my work fell in this category, like co-founding Colorado Village Collaborative and the Community Purchasing Alliance of Massachusetts); establishing policy/advocacy organizations and “think tanks” (used by conservatives & progressives); institution-oriented community organizing (as in most Alinsky-tradition organizing where institutions [not individuals] like congregations are the members); unions; church participation
4. Communal
A cohesive and open system of collective relations and culture. This could relate to existing communities who may be viewed as either inherently already holding the solution or the problem. It could relate to fostering new practices within an existing community like mutual aid (formal or informal), relationship building, public art or community events. It could mean forming new communities like monasteries or co-housing or simply weaving friends together to grow a sense of belonging and care. Both community insiders and outsiders can target the communal domain as a site of social change.
The communal domain of action raises the question: What collective practices of relationship and culture could be fostered, leveraged, eliminated or transformed to achieve the world we want?
Poverty reduction TOCC examples: any approach to poverty based on extracting high potential poor individuals or families from impoverished communities and placing them in “high potential” communities/institutions (richer neighborhoods, better schools, etc.; basically a way to solve an individual’s condition of poverty through a community-based lens); communal practices of care and mutual support; neighborhood-oriented community organizing models; utopian community experiments
5. Structural
The big, complex systems that give shape to the particular features of the societies we live in. Structures are the gestalt of our political economy, the force fields of laws and norms and massive patterns of relationships that produce the uneven and constantly evolving socioeconomic features of our lives (apologies for the academic mumbo-jumbo in that sentence, this was the hardest one to nail down!). It includes the political economy, of course. It’s also lots of sub-systems that make up the political economy (finance, industry, education, prison-police-military complex, governing bodies, etc.). It can’t be reduced to institutions because it’s about the emergent properties that institutions take on in interrelationship with one another, public policies, cultural norms, historical inertia, and contemporary events. It’s also about less abstract structures, like built environments how they shape the interrelationships between society and ecology. Structures limit the immediately available range of options available to a TOCC—shaping what seems politically imaginable or feasible on various time horizons. If a TOCC isn’t totally bogus, it recognize that the structural domain has massive “downstream” impacts on domains 1-4. There is a huge spectrum of potential changes that could be made to social structures: from using existing structures to solve your sub-structure or institution’s problem, to making small increases in funding, to major policy shifts, to reforming the deeper goals of structures, to revolutionary efforts, to dismantle structures and building other ones.3
The structural domain of action raises the question: How can changing social structures or imagining new ones contribute to achieving the society we want? and how would we as individuals, institutions, or communities go about changing structures given their size and power?
Poverty reduction TOCC examples: policy advocacy, political elections, most mass social movements, building alternative institutions toward the goal of weaving them together at scale into alternative structures, socialist revolutions
6. Paradigmatic
(In the “four I’s” model this would be called “ideologies” but I think that means something more specific than the broader domain I’m trying to get at here. I thought about calling it “ideas.” That might be better. But I published the first post with “paradigmatic” in the model so we’ll just go with it. Anyways…)
Social structures, relationships, ethics, cultures, senses of self, and all manner of social life are built on stories and the symbols that represent them. What we aspire to and desire, what we build, keep, or throw away, who we cherish and who we damage—if we haven’t deeply investigated the water of ideas we swim in, these decisions are largely made for us by the stories we inhabit. Change the story and the culture will follow. On a simpler level, and resonate with calling this domain more simply “ideas,” you could also just use ideas to persuade people to do stuff. That might mean saying things that resonate with existing paradigms and cultural narratives. It might mean writing really amazing overly long newsletter essays (oh hey!) or using any other form of media. It might mean finding the perfect political slogan to turn out your preferred voter (“Hope!” “Change!” “MAGA!”). It must also include the spectrum of educational systems and pedagogical approaches that implant, impose, foster, or cultivate ideas.
The intrapersonal domain of action raises the question: What new or alternative stories or compelling ideas could we tell that might foster the political imagination and will to action needed achieve the society we want? and how might we tell them?4
Poverty reduction TOCC examples: any book, article, youtube video, sermon, documentary or speech on poverty, inequality, class, charity, economics, etc.; teaching the poor ideas of self-improvement; teaching the poor about/to discern the causes of poverty and how to do something about it; social movement and political campaign slogans (from the 1% vs. the 99%; to welfare queens and compassionate conservatism); anything education related
Arguably the most significant and impactful component of a theory of change is how it relates the domains to one another.
As I said above, every TOCC has some explicit or implicit approach to every one of these domains. You can’t be human and avoid operating in them and in relation to them. The most effective and comprehensive TOCCs build synergy between each domain so that reinforcing feedback loops form which allow change to cascade, snowball, and gather momentum across every dimension of society. Systems thinking tells us that it is not so much the parts as the relationship between the parts that lends emergence and power to systemic dynamics. Get each domain working in the same direction and thoughtfully integrated with the others and you have the building blocks of something truly transformative.
One final note. I talked about this last time, but it’s too important not to mention again. So much rides on who the “agent/leader/actor” of a TOCC is. Who is the protagonist the TOCC’s story?
You can walk into these domains full of white savior-ism and technocratic hubris. Or you can show up with the right balance of humility and hutzpah, ready to listen, ready to speak from your heart, just as aware of your privilege and power as you are the ways the current social order personally harms you, committed to leadership from below, from the margins, from the disinherited, and always, always determined to pursue relationships of solidarity. The path we take (and it’s almost always some blend of the two) will determine just about everything else.
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One more post coming soon to wrap up this theory of theories of change. We will then move onto other theory of change concepts and models within this broader series while moving back and forth with essays that interweave spirituality and solidarity, theology and life.
peace, y’all
For a deeper dive on structural sin and structural love, see Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s great book Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation.
Credit for this view a combination of the Didache, St. Athanasius, and Gustavo Gutierrez’s liberation theology
I’ll do a post on this at a later date, but this last sentence is borrowing heavily from Donella Meadow’s famous essay “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”
My friend the very Rev. Dr. Amanda Henderson recently published her brilliant dissertation on exactly this question!