--- **Author:** Rani Pramesti **Contact:** [email protected] | LinkedIn **Year:** 2025 --- ## KEY TERMS #PowerLiteracy #NonprofitGovernance #Intersectionality #DesignFutures #SouthAndSoutheastAsia #StructuralPower #SocialPower #MotivationalPower #NarrativePower #SystemsDesign #ReflexivePractice #StoryBasedInquiry #GovernanceAsLeadership #PostColonialContexts #ParticipatoryMethodology --- ## LOCATE In this exegesis, I explore nonprofit governance in South and Southeast Asia through the lens of power literacy. While governance is often framed as neutral and technical, my research reveals it as an arena where power operates relationally, politically, and contextually. The work situates itself at the intersection of #DesignFutures, #GovernanceStudies, and #SystemsChange, challenging the dominance of Global North paradigms in governance theory. I engage with three nonprofit board case studies across South and Southeast Asia to analyse how power manifests in this region. I locate this study within an emerging conversation that redefines governance as a space of design — one that requires reflexivity, self-awareness, and cultural grounding. The project contributes to regional scholarship by foregrounding intersectionality and by proposing “power literacy” as a framework that enables boards to recognise, name, and work with power. Through integrating design methods, participatory storytelling, and systems mapping, I position nonprofit boards not as sites of administrative oversight, but as sites of power-literate systems design capable of cultivating equitable and transformative leadership practice across South and Southeast Asia. ## FOCUS The central question I investigate is: What types of power exist on nonprofit boards in South and Southeast Asia? This inquiry arose from my lived experience on boards and my observation that governance education seldom acknowledges power — who holds it, how it operates, and how it can be transformed. The research focuses on bridging the gap between theory and lived experience, developing a conceptual and practical understanding of how power circulates across structures, identities, and relationships. By combining Goodwill’s (2020) power literacy with Crenshaw’s (1991) intersectionality, I analyse governance as a dynamic interplay of #StructuralPower, #SocialPower, #MotivationalPower, and #NarrativePower. Each type reveals specific patterns of influence and exclusion: institutional hierarchies, class-based gatekeeping, personal ambition, and the shaping of reality through stories. My focus is not only diagnostic but generative — to equip nonprofit boards with tools for reflection and transformation. The outcome is a Power Literacy Reflection Guide: a practical framework to help boards identify the sources and effects of power, fostering accountability, inclusion, and conscious governance. Through this lens, I aim to reposition governance as a collective practice of power-aware design and leadership. ## REPORT Through three semi-structured interview–workshops with directors from South and Southeast Asia, I collected narrative data and co-created visual maps of decision-making dynamics. The participants’ stories — drawn from nonprofits across South and Southeast Asia — revealed how power circulates through formal structures and informal relationships. I synthesised these narratives into four categories: structural, social, motivational, and narrative power. Structural power captured how constitutional, political, and institutional systems constrain autonomy. Social power illuminated elite gatekeeping and class-based exclusivity in board recruitment. Motivational power highlighted the tension between personal ambition and organisational purpose, while narrative power exposed how silence and storytelling shape perceptions of legitimacy and leadership. By integrating design research methods such as story-based interviewing and visual mapping, I made visible the unseen dimensions of governance practice. These methods transformed participants from interviewees into co-analysts, fostering mutual reflection. The findings culminated in the creation of the Power Literacy Reflection Guide — fifteen reflective questions designed to support nonprofit boards in identifying hidden hierarchies and reframing governance as a conscious act of systems design. ## ARGUE I argue that nonprofit governance in South and Southeast Asia cannot be adequately understood or practiced without an explicit engagement with power. Governance is not neutral; it is a relational and political practice where structures, relationships, and stories converge to shape organisational life. By naming and working with power, boards can move beyond compliance and efficiency toward genuine #GovernanceAsLeadership. Power literacy offers a transformative pathway — it cultivates awareness of positionality, encourages dialogue about privilege, and fosters inclusion. When directors recognise how power manifests across structural, social, motivational, and narrative dimensions, they can consciously redistribute influence and create new cultures of accountability. I contend that boards are sites of design: living systems capable of reflection and redesign. Through participatory, story-based, and reflexive approaches, design becomes a means of working with complexity — not to erase difference but to surface and transform it. Power literacy thus becomes both a mirror and a method, enabling boards in the Global South to define governance on their own terms and lead from an understanding that every decision, silence, and story is an act of power. --- ## AUTHOR I am a Genderqueer Indonesian-Chinese governance scholar and design practitioner currently based in Bali, Indonesia. As Executive Director of Wedu, I work with women leaders across South and Southeast Asia to cultivate equitable leadership ecosystems. My practice integrates intersectionality, power literacy, and storytelling to shift how organisations perceive and exercise power. Having lived for 24 years in Australia, my work is informed by navigating multiple cultural contexts — from First Nations sovereignty to Southeast Asian collectivism. Through my Master of Design Futures research, I aim to bridge theory and lived practice, positioning boards as sites for conscious, power-literate design. **Author Key Terms** #GovernanceScholar #IntersectionalLeader #PowerLiteratePractitioner #DesignForSystemsChange #SoutheastAsianFutures