Making Institutions Work: Strategies for Engaging the State through Legal Empowerment

Making Institutions Work: Strategies for Engaging the State Through Legal Empowerment explores how grassroots justice organizations help communities navigate and influence the institutions that shape their lives. Drawing on the experiences of 17 legal empowerment organizations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the paper brings together lessons from multi-year participatory action research.

Through firsthand “strategy stories,” practitioners share how they map power, build relationships, generate evidence, form alliances, and strategically combine collaboration, advocacy, protest, and litigation to advance community priorities. At its core, the paper asks: How can communities build enough power to engage the state on more equal terms—and how can that engagement contribute to more responsive institutions and stronger democracy? The experiences offer a grounded perspective on rebuilding connections between people and institutions from the bottom up.