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Democracy’s Fuel: More Horizontally Empowered People and Institutions

Loka Ashwood just published her paper with ARJ and writes

“Party-line politics now dominate the way we talk about our pathways forward in democratic societies. We often focus on a community’s vote to express our disdain or support of them. People who vote one way or another become caricatures recast as foe or friend. This leveling of people likewise distances our institutions administratively, making our engagement seem only possible through the ballot box. I call these largely vertical formations of power and action.

There are other ways forward that aren’t so dichotomous that get more fundamentally at what’s not working with our democratic institutions. I think this begins by answering direct calls for aid by communities that are ignored institutionally. I began such a project when a student I taught connected me to the principal of an elementary school, Dr. Christy Hiett, who was alarmed by a series of childhood and adolescent cancer diagnoses in her rural Alabama school district. Dr. Hiett and the community at large had been repeatedly sidelined by agencies entrusted with safeguarding the public’s health and clean water when they asked for a state investigation. This historical and ongoing lack of support shaped their deeply seated distrust of government agencies.

However, the community was ready to act when able to pursue creative and spontaneous routes forward. I helped Dr. Hiett and other community members use participatory action strategies to pursue their vision of freedom from childhood cancer as well as freedom to a safe and livable environment. They worked with universities to test their air, water and soil. They installed their own reverse osmosis systems. They cleaned up dump sites. They did this through low cost, empowering, and meaningful methods. I call these largely horizontal formations of power and action.

But these horizontal efforts eventually required vertical support to fully address current and future contamination. Even with the community’s evidence at hand and a plan for resolution, Alabama state agencies found no need to earmark funds to support municipal water connections and clean up a local chemical mixing rubber site.  This further entrenched distrust in the government.

Agencies and their dominant understandings of how action and power work proved too vertical. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the Alabama Department of Public Health barricaded access through hierarchical practices. Yet horizontal methods and tools exist that can help agencies practice humility through local embeddedness. All we need to do is employ them to make the vertical stand up to protect the horizontal. Therein rests democracy’s fuel and potential organizational antidote to the legitimacy crisis.

Forever citation: Ashwood, L. (2026) Horizontal and Vertical: The Dimensions of Power and Action. Action Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503261461941