ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to define and clarify the concepts of 'power', 'social power' and 'community power' so that a base understanding of the nature of power relations within urban regeneration partnerships could be developed. It highlights that policy agents may deploy various strategies in order to effect change within the policy process. The chapter describes that all agents have the potential to influence decision-making. Local communities may engage in 'legitimate' counteractive strategies in order influence decision-making and achieve outcomes that they desire. Alternatively, local communities may opt for a 'radical' counteractive strategy. Pluralist theory has traditionally been concerned with the analysis of 'power' within policy arenas operating at the level of national, regional and city politics. Waste has developed a typology of pluralist theory that illustrates various patterns of power based on successive empirical analyses of the policy process. These theoretical variants included: 'classical pluralism'; hyper-pluralism'; 'stratified pluralism'; and 'privatized pluralism'.
