BY Daniela Marin Platero, Marcela Marin
In this conversation, sisters Daniela and Marcela unpack some of the ideas at the heart of feminist organizing, from participation and collective leadership to care and power. Together, they reflect on what it takes to build organizations that don’t just speak the language of feminism, but practice it. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below, available in both English and Spanish.
Block 1. Opening
Daniela:
Welcome, Marcela. Thank you for joining this invitation that RESURJ has extended to us to reflect on feminist leadership. Today we want to talk about some words we constantly use in social and feminist movements, such as participation, consultation processes, collective leadership, and care.
What happens when these ideas stop transforming power and simply become discourse?
We are interested in thinking about these questions from a decolonial feminist perspective, in order to ask ourselves when they lose their political force and what conditions we need for them to actually produce change.
Block 2. The concept that raises suspicion: Participation and consultation
Daniela:
RESURJ posed the question to us: What is a term related to feminist leadership that we have started to distrust, and why?
I have started to distrust the terms “participation” and “consultation” when they are used to describe processes that promise inclusion but don’t transform the power relations that organize decision-making. Participation becomes symbolic when being present becomes the goal in itself.
Participating sometimes means merely occupying a place in spaces where the fundamental decisions have already been made. Being present doesn’t always mean having a voice, and having a voice doesn’t always mean having real capacity to influence. The question then stops being how many people participate and becomes: Who decides? What decisions remain open? Who has the capacity to influence the outcome?
Frequently, participation functions as a mechanism of legitimization. Certain groups are invited to contribute experience, knowledge, time, or political legitimacy, without this implying any effective influence over priorities, the allocation of resources, or final decisions. Inclusion happens, but power stays in the same place.
How do people know their participation influenced an outcome? If there is no feedback about how the contributions made were incorporated, transformed, or discarded, participation runs the risk of becoming a symbolic act rather than a practice of real influence.
Marcela:
I’m also troubled by the lack of transparency that tends to surround many participatory processes. There is rarely clarity about which decisions have already been made, which elements are actually negotiable, or how the contributions made are incorporated, modified, or discarded. When we don’t know the conditions of the process or the scope of our participation, it’s difficult to distinguish between genuine consultation and the validation of previously defined decisions.
From a decolonial feminist perspective, it’s important to recognize that participation can also conceal unequal power relations under the appearance of openness and democracy. That is why it’s necessary to ask ourselves: participate in what system? under what rules? and for whose benefit?
These questions lead us to another fundamental issue: who is invited to participate and who is left out? But also: On which topics is the participation of some people considered valid and not that of others? Not all voices are recognized in the same way. Frequently, greater legitimacy is granted to academic, technical, or institutional knowledge than to community, territorial, or ancestral knowledge. Moreover, processes usually take place in dominant languages, with technical or bureaucratic terminology that excludes other forms of expression and knowledge. This can limit the capacity to influence decisions of those who don’t master those codes.
Likewise, certain voices acquire more authority depending on social class, racialization, ethnic belonging, territorial origin, age, gender, educational level, language, or the institutional position they hold. Even in spaces that seek to be inclusive, the coloniality of knowledge continues to operate by defining who is considered an expert and who is not.
Daniela
On the other hand, I think what sometimes happens is that certain marginalized communities or groups are indeed included or invited to participate, but this comes from a logic of tokenization that seeks to expand a list, to check one more box, rather than to genuinely share power or to respond to and center the needs, demands, and interests of these groups and populations.
Or as when organizations, funders, or international spaces spotlight certain women leaders as “representatives” of much broader processes, sometimes generating concentrations of recognition, resources, and power that don’t always reflect the diversity of the movement.
Participation also tends to render invisible the material conditions that make it possible. The emotional, economic, and time costs involved in attending meetings, sustaining processes, preparing to intervene, or taking on additional tasks are rarely acknowledged. This is especially evident when spaces rest on unpaid care work or on people whose availability is taken for granted. From a feminist ethics of care, participating shouldn’t mean sacrificing well-being, rest, or personal sustainability.
Thinking about this takes me back to a consultation process that took place in response to a collective complaint about unfair and abusive labor dynamics. The response process was immediate, followed the established protocols, gathered experiences, included the whole team, and proposed changes. However, the process was truly draining, intimidating in many cases, and the experiences that were shared were invalidated. Much of what was reported and denounced was justified by the context, the workload, and other conditions. The complaint ended up being minimized, and the solutions proposed from this exercise didn’t respond to the structural failures underlying the denounced dynamics but were instead cosmetic responses that neither questioned nor affected the structure or the power relations at play.
Perhaps the underlying question in many cases isn’t how much participation exists, but how much power, recognition, and decision-making capacity we are actually willing to redistribute.
Block 3. Collective leadership: beyond sharing tasks
Marcela:
What roles, responsibilities, or practices need to be clarified for collective leadership to work?
Collective leadership doesn’t happen simply because several people participate in a process. It requires explicit, transparent, and revisable agreements that make it possible to share power without diluting responsibilities. One of the most frequent tensions in spaces that seek horizontality is that, in the absence of clarity, decisions tend to keep concentrating among those with greater formal authority, more access to information, or more capacity to dedicate time to the process.
That’s why one of the fundamental aspects is defining decision-making lines clearly. Who is responsible for making which decisions? How far does each person’s responsibility extend? Which decisions can be made autonomously and which require consultation, deliberation, or collective agreement? Horizontality doesn’t mean that everyone decides everything all the time, but rather that there’s clarity about how authority is distributed and how and how its exercise is held accountable.
Daniela:
Sharing leadership doesn’t mean power disappears; it means making visible how it circulates.
Equally important is agreeing on how information is managed. The production, access, circulation, and interpretation of information are forms of power that often go unnoticed. Real influence frequently doesn’t depend only on who votes or participates, but on who has early access to information, who defines what’s relevant, and who controls the channels through which it circulates. That’s why mechanisms of transparency, accountability, and follow-up on agreements are essential for participation to have meaning.
Marcela:
I think a key dimension when talking about collective leadership is care. It’s not enough to redistribute tasks; we need to ask how the physical, emotional, and relational burdens that sustain collective processes are distributed.
This leads us to a fundamental question: what kind of leadership are we promoting when exhaustion is normalized and permanent availability becomes an implicit requirement?
And the thing is, this is a deeply rooted culture in many social movements and activist spaces: the normalization of overwork. Sacrifice is often valued as proof of political commitment. People are expected to work after hours, to be permanently available, or to postpone their own needs in the name of the cause. From a feminist ethics of care, it’s necessary to reject the idea that the most committed people are necessarily those who burn out the most.
De-normalizing martyrdom is also a form of political transformation. It means recognizing that the sustainability of movements depends not only on their capacity to mobilize, but also on their capacity to care for those who sustain them.
Daniela:
Incorporating care would mean transforming the way we plan work. Plans wouldn’t be built on the idea of an infinite availability of time and energy, but rather considering that people get sick, care for others, go through grief, need rest, and have responsibilities outside the organizing space. Work would be planned with sufficient margins for pause, adaptation, and uncertainty.
Likewise, a care perspective questions the way institutional timelines and priorities are set. All too often, deadlines are organized around the agendas of those with greater formal power, supervisory capacity, or authority to approve results. A more democratic practice would mean asking who defines the timelines and who bears the costs of sustaining them.
Another form of care is cultivating capacities to hold uncomfortable conversations, ones in which there are disagreements, differences in pace or in priorities, avoiding resorting to indirect mechanisms to express dissent. This also means normalizing responses like “I didn’t manage it,” “I’m struggling with this,” or “this isn’t a priority,” understanding that acknowledging limits, difficulties, or different priorities shouldn’t be interpreted as a lack of commitment, but as part of building more honest, sustainable, and caring forms of organization.
Ultimately, collective leadership requires something more than sharing responsibilities. The question isn’t only how we work together, but what conditions we need so that no one bears a disproportionate share of the responsibilities, risks, or care that sustain the process.
Block 4. Closing
Marcela:
Perhaps the challenge isn’t getting more people to participate, but asking ourselves who decides, who is heard, and who bears the costs of sustaining those spaces.
And perhaps collective leadership isn’t measured by how many people are in a meeting, but by how much power, care, and recognition we’re capable of redistributing.
Building more feminist organizations requires something more than participation: it requires transforming the power relations we’ve inherited and learning to organize collective life through co-responsibility, care, and justice.
You can download and read the Spanish transcript below:
You can listen to the audio here