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Contribution short abstract

This paper demonstrates how systems thinking methodology centers marginalized voices in GBV research, revealing how communities actively challenge top-down intervention models and assert agency in defining both the problems and solutions.

Contribution long abstract

Traditional gender-based violence interventions reflect top-down development paradigms that position communities as passive recipients rather than active agents of change. This paper applies systems thinking as a methodological framework that centers grassroots perspectives and reveals community agency in addressing GBV.

Drawing on systems analysis conducted with communities in Kenya, this paper demonstrates how boundary critique methodology makes visible the power dynamics, knowledge systems, and decision-making structures that typically exclude those most affected by violence. The framework examines who defines GBV as a problem, who designs interventions, whose knowledge counts as legitimate, and whose voices remain marginalized in dominant approaches.

The paper argues that systems thinking reveals three critical dimensions of grassroots agency. First, it illuminates how communities already possess sophisticated understandings of the interconnected factors such as employment, and education, that enable violence. Second, it identifies community-led strategies and informal networks that operate alongside or in resistance to formal interventions. Third, it demonstrates how centering lived experience challenges technical-expert paradigms and reconfigures power in research partnerships.

This methodological contribution addresses calls for development approaches that recognize communities as knowledge producers and active shapers of alternative futures. The paper concludes by reflecting on how systems thinking can support genuinely participatory research that privileges community agency over external expertise, moving beyond extractive research models toward partnerships that reimagine who holds power in defining both problems and pathways toward justice.