Tending the Tensions: Reflections on Power, Agency, and Community

Kilian • 3 February 2026 at 12:48 GMT+7 Vietnam Time (UTC+7)

14 minutes

transition studiessystems thinkingpolitical economyparticipatory action researchcivic techsocio-technical designsystems thinkingresilience

Growing resilient community infrastructures

A decade ago, we set out to explore questions around food, community, technology, and sustainable business through a collaborative project with a local community in inner-city Dublin, Ireland. You can read about it here.

Why revisit this project today? Three reasons compel me to return to this work. First, I've noticed increasing content on LinkedIn—particularly from UN Innovation sources—that resonates with our experience. I want to capture the learning, lessons, and insights from this project and communicate them to others exploring similar territories or facing comparable challenges. Second, I want to contextualize this work within our contemporary understanding of the issues it tackled, giving names to concepts, theories, and practices that may not have existed or been widely understood at the time. Finally, I want to address some lingering tensions and systemic observations that this process surfaces.

This is a reflection piece that revisits the project as critical design practice, connecting it to contemporary conversations around community infrastructure, social innovation, social business, community development, social justice, and community and systemic resilience. It highlights enduring tensions encountered during the project, acknowledges areas for improvement, and identifies the mindsets that persist today. To bring this reflection up to date, I've incorporated recent research, terminology, theories, and practices that have emerged since the project's inception.

Some of the topics to be discussed:

Political Economy: Power dynamics, resource distribution, economic models
Participatory Action Research: Community-engaged methodology, collaborative knowledge creation
Philosophy: Ethics, values, epistemology, knowledge production
Systems Thinking: Interconnections, complexity, emergence, holistic understanding
Care Ethics: Relationality, maintenance work, sustaining communities
Transition Studies: Systemic change, transformation pathways, social-ecological shifts
Regenerative Design: Beyond sustainability, restoration, life-affirming systems
Resilience Theory: Adaptive capacity, community strength, responding to change
Commons Theory: Collective resource management, shared governance, commoning practices

Decentering Dualities: A Different Kind of Reflection

This is not a typical case study. It's a theoretical reckoning with the tensions that emerged when we tried to build community digital infrastructure—tensions that resist neat resolution and demand we sit with contradiction rather than collapse it into certainty.

This piece inhabits what some call a metamodern sensibility: oscillating between positions without settling, acknowledging both the earnest desire for better worlds and the ironic awareness of how easily that desire reproduces the patterns it seeks to dismantle. It's about moving beyond dualisms—not by synthesizing them, but by recognizing that the tensions themselves are generative.

The work was messy. The questions remain open. And perhaps that's the point.

Part 1: Agriculture, Technology, and the Ideology of Optimization

Agronomy vs. Agroecology: Two Ways of Relating to Land

At the heart of the GrowDome project was a tension between two paradigms of agricultural practice: agronomy and agroecology.

Agronomy operates from an industrial logic:

Maximize yields
Drive costs down
Boost efficiencies
Reduce labor costs
Scale production linearly

This is the agricultural expression of what James C. Scott called "high modernism"—the belief that nature and society can be rendered legible, measured, controlled, and optimized through scientific rationality and technological intervention.

Agroecology, by contrast, centers sustainable interactions:

Ecological sustainability
Biodiversity preservation
Ecosystem relationships
Systems-level thinking
Social and economic equity

Agroecology doesn't just optimize differently—it questions the logic of optimization itself. It asks: What if the goal isn't maximum output, but resilient relationships between soil, water, plants, pollinators, and people?

The Hidden Ideology in "Empowerment"

Here's where it gets uncomfortable: when we set out to build technology to "empower" community growers, we were still operating within agronomic logic—even as we claimed agroecological values.

The power-giver fallacy: Who am I to "empower" you? The very framing assumes I hold power and you lack it—a relationship that technology will mediate by transferring agency from me to you. But this framework embeds domination at its foundation.

The agency paradox: Systems designed to empower often create new dependencies. The platform becomes the intermediary through which agency must flow. "Empowerment" becomes conditional on adoption, on learning our interface, on playing by rules we designed.

Control disguised as liberation: When we say technology "empowers farmers," what we often mean is: technology makes farmers legible to optimization. Sensors generate data. Data enables analysis. Analysis informs intervention. The farmer's tacit knowledge—learned through seasons of observation, inherited through generations of practice—becomes secondary to what the system can measure.

This isn't unique to agriculture. It's the structure of digital platforms generally: they "empower" by creating conditions you must accept to access their affordances.

Cultivating Conditions vs. Granting Power

What if we reframed the work entirely?

Instead of "empowering" growers, what if we focused on cultivating conditions for agency to emerge? This shifts the question from "What can we give you?" to "What scaffolding supports your autonomy?"

The metaphor is intentional. In agriculture, you don't "make" plants grow—you tend the soil, manage water, provide light, remove competing weeds. Growth is something the plant does. Your role is to hold space for life to unfold.

What would technology look like if it operated from this principle? Not tools that impose order, but infrastructure that supports emergence.

Part 2: Food Security, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Sustenance

Security vs. Sovereignty: Who Decides?

The language of food security dominates international development discourse. It focuses on: availability, access, utilization, stability. The question is: Can everyone get enough food?

Food sovereignty, articulated by movements like La Via Campesina, asks different questions:

Who controls the food system?
Who decides what gets grown, how, and for whom?
Who owns the land, the seeds, the knowledge?
What social and ecological relationships does food production sustain or destroy?

Food sovereignty is about autonomy and self-determination. It's political.

The GrowDome project sat in the uncomfortable space between these frameworks. We wanted to contribute to food security—helping a community grow fresh produce in an urban food desert. But we also recognized that security without sovereignty reproduces dependency.

The Six Pillars of Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty rests on principles that extend far beyond agricultural technique:

Food as a basic human right
Agrarian reform and land access
Protection of natural resources and biodiversity
Reorganization of food trade to prioritize local markets
Democratic control of the food system
Dignity and livelihoods for food producers

Notice what this demands: not just better farming methods, but transformation of ownership structures, governance systems, economic relationships, and political power.

Technology can support these shifts—but only if we're honest about the systems it operates within.

Part 3: Embeddedness, Structure, and the Model Question

Social Enterprise, Social Farm, Social Innovation

The GrowDome network had to sustain itself economically while serving community needs. This meant navigating the terrain of social enterprise—organizations that blend social mission with market logic.

The question was never just: Can this work technically? It was: What legal structure, ownership model, governance system, and economic strategy will let this thrive without sacrificing its values?

Social entrepreneurship often sounds like: "We'll solve social problems through market mechanisms." But markets have logics—competition, growth, profit maximization—that can quietly reshape missions over time.

Social farms center therapeutic and educational work with vulnerable populations, integrating agricultural production with social inclusion.

Social innovation asks: How do we create new approaches to persistent social challenges? It's less about the legal form and more about the generative process.

Each model embeds different assumptions about what community is, who has authority, how decisions get made, and where value flows.

Embeddedness as Resistance

Here's the core tension: community-rooted initiatives resist extraction precisely because they're embedded in place, relationships, and local knowledge systems. They can't be easily replicated because what makes them work isn't the technology or the organizational chart—it's the specific constellation of people, histories, and contexts they emerge from.

But institutional partners—funders, city councils, development agencies—want scalability. They want proof that investing here will yield results elsewhere. They want the model.

Embeddedness is both the source of resilience and the barrier to recognition within systems that value portability over particularity.

This creates impossible binds: To get support, you need to demonstrate replicability. But what makes your work valuable is its irreplaceable situatedness.

Part 4: Infrastructure—Physical, Digital, and Temporal

What Is Community Infrastructure?

Infrastructure is usually thought of as roads, pipes, power grids—the material substrate that enables other activities. But infrastructure is also:

Physical space: The geodesic dome wasn't just a growing environment. It was a gathering place, a learning site, a symbol of possibility.

Temporal space: The rhythms of planting and harvest structured when people came together, what work needed doing, what conversations could unfold.

Digital infrastructure: Platforms, data systems, communication tools—but also the literacies and practices these systems require.

Social infrastructure: The relationships, trust, norms, and rituals that make collective action possible.

Infrastructure isn't neutral. It shapes what becomes possible and for whom.

Convening: Making Space for Collective Imaginary

Perhaps the most important function of infrastructure is convening—creating conditions for people to gather, to imagine together, to build shared meaning.

The GrowDome space held:

Community workshops
Skill-sharing sessions
Food distribution events
Celebrations and rituals
Conversations about futures

This is what we mean by collective imaginary: the shared sense of what could be, developed not through abstract visioning but through embodied practice of being together.

Digital tools can support this—coordinating gatherings, capturing learning, amplifying voices. But they can also displace it, substituting online interaction for co-presence, algorithmic feeds for deliberate attention.

Data Literacy, Community Empowerment, and Digital Divides

Here we encounter the "empowerment" paradox again. Digital infrastructure was meant to enhance community capacity. But:

Data literacy isn't neutral knowledge—it's a set of practices shaped by particular worldviews about what counts as evidence, what deserves attention, how truth is established.

Community empowerment through technology assumes everyone has equal access to devices, connectivity, time, cognitive bandwidth, and confidence navigating digital systems. They don't.

Digital divides aren't just about access—they're about who gets to define what the technology does, how it works, what values it serves.

We tried to address this through participatory design, training, and documentation. But the fundamental tension remained: we were asking a community to adopt tools built on assumptions that might not be theirs.

Transformational Spaces and Collective Imaginary

What made the GrowDome work—when it worked—wasn't the technology. It was that people found something they couldn't find elsewhere: permission to experiment, space to learn, relationships that mattered.

The dome became a transformational space: a place where people could practice different ways of being together, different relationships to food and land, different economic arrangements.

Digital infrastructure supported this when it made the space more accessible, the learning more portable, the connections more durable. It undermined it when it created new gatekeeping, imposed external logics, or substituted metrics for meaning.

Part 5: Tensions That Remain

Power: Who Decides?

The question of power never left. Every design choice encoded assumptions about authority:

Who can see what data?
Who can modify the system?
Who decides what features matter?
Whose knowledge gets elevated?

We tried to distribute power through participatory governance. But participation requires time, knowledge, confidence—resources not everyone has equally. Participatory processes can reproduce existing hierarchies even as they claim to dismantle them.

Plurality vs. Monoculture

Agricultural monoculture is ecologically fragile—one disease can wipe out entire harvests. Diversity creates resilience.

The same logic applies to social systems. When everyone uses the same platform, speaks the same technical language, follows the same protocols, we lose the adaptive capacity that comes from multiple approaches.

The tension: institutions want standardization (it's easier to scale, measure, fund). Communities need flexibility (because contexts differ, needs evolve, relationships are particular).

How do we build infrastructure that supports plurality without fragmenting into incoherence?

Regeneration: Beyond Sustainability

Sustainability asks: How do we maintain what we have?

Regeneration asks: How do we heal what's been harmed?

This isn't just ecological—it's social, economic, political. In contexts marked by dispossession, extraction, and violence, building community infrastructure isn't about sustaining existing conditions. It's about creating conditions for renewal.

But regeneration takes time. It requires patience, care, investment without immediate return. It resists the logics of quarter-by-quarter reporting and fixed-term funding cycles.

The Space Between: Physical, Digital, Social

The most interesting dynamics happened in the spaces between digital and physical, individual and collective, technical and social.

The sensor data meant nothing until growers interpreted it through their embodied knowledge
The platform enabled coordination, but trust came from face-to-face work
The technology amplified capacity, but relationships sustained commitment

Infrastructure isn't the hardware or the software—it's the whole ecology of people, practices, tools, and places that holds space for life to flourish.

What I'm Still Learning

A decade later, I'm less certain about answers and more comfortable with questions:

On Technology and Community: Can digital tools genuinely support community autonomy, or do they inevitably create new forms of dependence? What would truly emancipatory technology look like—and who gets to define "emancipatory"?

On Scale and Replication: Is the impulse to scale inherently extractive? What if the alternative to scaling isn't staying small, but building networks of distinct, locally-rooted efforts that share patterns rather than implementations?

On Power and Design: How do we acknowledge the power we bring to design processes without performing false modesty? How do we genuinely share authority when we have institutional backing, technical expertise, and structural advantages?

On Embeddedness and Institutions: Can institutions designed for standardization and scale genuinely support work that's valuable precisely because it's embedded, particular, and resistant to abstraction?

On Care and Efficiency: How do we make space for care work—the maintenance, the relationship-building, the slow cultivation of trust—within systems that demand measurable outcomes and demonstrable impact?

Closing: Holding the Tensions

This reflection hasn't resolved the tensions it names. That's intentional.

The work of building community infrastructure—whether physical, digital, or social—means sitting with contradiction:

Wanting autonomy for communities while bringing institutional resources that create dependencies
Claiming agroecological values while using technologies born from industrial logic
Aspiring to "empower" while recognizing the paternalism embedded in that framing
Building for embeddedness while institutional partners demand replicability
Valuing care while operating within systems that reward efficiency

These aren't problems to solve. They're conditions to navigate with humility, honesty, and attention to who bears the cost when tensions inevitably produce friction.

A decade later, the questions feel more important than the answers. The GrowDome project taught me that good work doesn't happen despite complexity—it happens through sustained engagement with complexity. Not collapsing it into clarity, but learning to work within it.

The work continues. The questions remain open. And perhaps that's exactly where they should be.

Acknowledgments

This reflection builds on the work of many people who contributed to the GrowDome project—community members, designers, engineers, city officials, and institutional partners. Their labor, knowledge, and commitment made the work possible. The tensions explored here aren't criticisms of their efforts but honest grappling with the systemic conditions we all navigated together.