Podcast with Deepa Narayan on power and love and global development

What if the missing ingredient in every failed development project, broken institution, and dysfunctional team is not better rules but love? Deepa Narayan, who spent 35 years working on global poverty, including 20 years with the UN and World Bank, argues that power without love produces coercion, and love without power produces sentimentality. Real collaboration requires both. Subscribe for more episodes on how collaboration works in practice. Deepa Narayan brings an unusual combination of lived experience and institutional authority to the question of collaboration. She has lived in villages for a decade working with women's groups, served as senior advisor to the World Bank, and conducted hundreds of interviews across India on masculinity, femininity, and the hidden dynamics that determine whether people cooperate or dominate. Her framework is built on two pillars: power and love. Most development work and organizational theory focuses exclusively on power and rules. Narayan argues this is why so much of it fails. She identifies three types of power , power over (coercion), power with (shared), and power within (internal) , and insists they cannot be separated. In practice, most large organizations and families default to power over, even when they claim otherwise. The love component is not sentimental. Narayan defines it as the human longing for connection, appreciation, and belonging , needs so fundamental that when they are violated, individuals and societies break down. Her research on masculinity in India reveals how boys as young as seven are taught to suppress vulnerability, dominate others, and equate manhood with control. This socialization produces adults incapable of the emotional openness that genuine collaboration requires. The conversation connects personal and structural dynamics with striking directness. Narayan asks why one in three women worldwide experiences physical violence from intimate partners, and traces the answer through the same power dynamics that undermine institutional collaboration. When organizations reward dominance and punish vulnerability, they replicate at scale what dysfunctional families produce at the individual level. On development practice, Narayan draws from analyzing hundreds of successful community-led groups. The pattern is consistent: groups that sustain collaboration over time combine clear power-sharing structures with genuine care for members as whole human beings. Groups that focus only on rules and incentives eventually collapse when external pressure arrives. Her analysis of education is particularly pointed. Schools, she argues, deepen gender stereotypes rather than challenging them, perpetuating the very dynamics that make collaboration difficult. Yet research shows that when children receive different messages, they influence their parents' decisions , because those decisions come from love. Every channel for changing minds and hearts must be used simultaneously. When asked what she would change about humans, Narayan's answer is immediate: fill every human being with love, the feeling of being loved and supported by a hundred people, then let them go to do their own thing. It is the lack of feeling appreciated and valued that destroys individuals and societies alike. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.