Power is everywhere: your parents exercise the power over you to decide what time you go to bed; the teacher exercises power over you, deciding how to run your instruction; the government, at the highest level, exercises the power to decide how to use tax money to influence your life. But, even when you do not notice it, you have power too. You have power over friends to persuading them  where to go out at night. You have power over your colleagues to persuading them to take one decision instead of another.

Power has a relational nature. It is always exercised within social interactions and it is never static. It shifts and changes, it ebbs and flows. In this regard, it can be delegated as ‘entrusted power’: we can entrust it to others, so that they can make decisions and act on behalf of our good, or we can be entrusted by society, especially through the work we do, and in all roles and tasks we hold within any social groups (friends, family, sports team, school class, association etc).

Power is not good or evil per se: there can be good or evil uses of it. Entrusted power makes us responsible for the well-being and the life of others. Therefore, delegated power can be used judiciously and with care, or badly and for private interests, with disregard for and ultimately to the detriment of those who entrusted the power.

A bad use of power can be called ‘abuse of power’ and leads to corruption. Or even better: to the ‘abuse of entrusted power for private interests’.
Therefore, It is up to us to make good use of the power others entrust to us.
We need social trust (the pillar of our society, see call to refl-action 1) to think the power we delegate will be used for public interest, but it is always important, as citizens, to monitor how others use their entrusted power for the best public interest.