[This story is part of our collection on transforming research collaboration. It highlights efforts and challenges in reimagining partnerships for greater equity, with a focus on strengthening Southern-led approaches to research.]

Embracing the Digital Shift

As a group of individuals with the drive to amplify voices of those that are the most marginalised, we have been working towards enabling participatory democracy; with a focus on people-centred and people-led research, which goes beyond tokenistic participation to perceiving communities as agents of change. This stems from the belief that for development to be sustainable, the process must be truly participative. 

For decades, our engagement with nearly 90 community-based organisations across India has been rooted in amplifying the voices of communities in decision-making spaces. For example, post-the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), we conducted “ground-level panels” as a response to high-level panels, where affected people with lived experiences deliberated on the impacts of MDGs focused on themes like health, agriculture, livelihoods and forest rights. This process highlighted how global frameworks often failed to reflect ground realities.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought an abrupt halt to all our physical interactions. In-person engagement, the foundation of our participatory work, was no longer feasible. At the same time, we saw an explosion of the digital space, forcing us to explore ways of staying connected with these communities and, more importantly, to remain participatory in our approach, online. It was at this time that we started an initiative called COLLECT – a Community-Led Local Claims and Entitlement Tracker across 70 districts in India, gathering real-time data to assess ground realities, while also strengthening community-led initiatives to sustain work at the grassroots level and to revive collective action during the crisis.

We were able to build an architecture with a base of about 70 researchers and 560 fellows from diverse communities, specifically from hamlets and village clusters inhabited by scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, denotified and nomadic tribes, Muslims, and trans and non-binary communities. At the time, they were all connected through telephones and Zoom calls only (a medium they learnt to navigate alongside us during the pandemic). We started spending our travel costs on communications — supporting the community communications through covering phone charging costs using that travel budget. The community was involved not only in data collection and planning but also in the analysis and use of that data, challenging the traditional notion of “travelling the last mile”, as per the concept used by Pradeep Narayanan and Tarini J. Shipurkar in a chapter of a book published in 2025.

During this time, we also organised nearly 40 webinars where we prioritised speakers who hailed from some of the most affected communities (sanitation workers, morgue workers, sex workers, minorities, and other vulnerable groups). The diverse engagement of these webinars prompted us to rethink our approach and embrace digital tools—not merely as a substitute for community engagement but to enhance our reach. 

Global North Dominance over Narratives and Frameworks in the Development Sector

This shift to digital platforms not only reshaped how we worked but also expanded our networks beyond borders. As we engaged with global collectives and communities of practice, we became acutely aware of the dominance of the Global North in shaping development narratives and frameworks. 

By the end of 2023, one such space where this influence was particularly visible was the rapidly evolving discourse on Business and Human Rights (BHR). Many Global North countries were witnessing a surge in debates, largely driven by the introduction of mandatory due diligence laws. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights had become increasingly mainstream, laying the groundwork for legal frameworks that sought to hold businesses accountable. By mid-2024, the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) was being hailed as a milestone, reinforcing the growing momentum around corporate responsibility.

This surge in regulatory measures also shaped the contours of the BHR space—still a relatively young field, largely occupied by niche experts focused on transparency and risk reduction. However, the pandemic-induced shift to online interactions created an opening for organisations from the Global South working on BHR issues to connect, exchange knowledge, and challenge existing narratives.

Global North Dominance Watch (GNDW) was one such initiative aimed at bridging debates on responsible business practices by drawing from related, long-established fields—including legally binding treaties, trade justice, tax justice, trade unions, and state-business nexus perspectives. These domains, with over five decades of experience in challenging corporate power and examining the intersections of economic systems, human rights, and accountability, offered critical insights that were often overlooked in mainstream BHR discussions.

This intersection of old and new debates signalled a shift—one that challenged the dominance of Global North perspectives and brought forward the lived realities and expertise of those working at the frontline of corporate accountability struggles.

The Work of Global North Dominance Watch 

GNDW is a collective effort, operating entirely on a voluntary basis. Since its inception in 2022, where a discussion was held on redefining Just Transition, GNDW has evolved into a platform critically examining Global North dominance in shaping global frameworks. This initiative emerged from the need to integrate debates on tax justice, toxic colonialism, migration, and greenwashing, emphasising the necessity of decolonising Just Transition discourse.

By April 2024, GNDW brought together experts on Occupational Safety and Health (OSH). The discussions positioned OSH as a strategic entry point to analyse Global North dominance, given its direct links to workers’ rights, businesses, Small and Medium Enterprises, and environmental concerns. Around the same time, debates on the Loss and Damage Fund were intensifying. Recognising the need to decolonise these discussions, GNDW hosted a webinar in May 2024, presenting a paper that centred Global South perspectives and produced a report on the Fund’s architecture and functioning.

Through these efforts, we recognised that Global North dominance is not only structural but also epistemological. Concepts originating in the Global South are often sanitised, stripped of their political context, and repurposed within Global North policy frameworks, often rendering them meaningless or drastically altered. A prime example is the overuse and dilution of intersectionality. In the context of the CSDDD, our report on anti-colonial epistemology was an attempt at building a framework to critically evaluate CSDDD’s implications, analysing how key concepts have been reshaped over time.

Taking this debate further, our aim was to explore ways of democratising knowledge spaces in Business and Human Rights (BHR), underscoring the power imbalances in global standard-settings and developing an actionable plan focused on collective collaboration. Over time, our discussions also explored a critical perspective on Human Rights Due Diligence through the lens of forced labour, challenging the singular narratives shaping corporate accountability debates.

GNDW also critiques the UN’s agenda-setting processes, where Global North countries draft initial frameworks while Global South nations are relegated to a commenting role. Looking ahead to 2045, we launched an agenda advocating for South-South collaboration in the UN Centenary Goals. However, we also acknowledge the difficulty in defining the Global South, as some countries continue to replicate Global North models, and Global North influences persist within Global South policymaking.

While building alliances with progressive Global North actors, we argue that the space for ‘rigorous analysis’ should remain a space for everyone, not exclusively for the Global North, as it often does. Often Global South voices are expected to remain “innocent”—void of technical or political critique.

Emerging Insights: The Need to Redefine Narratives

Though it is still early, a few key insights from our work so far include the urgency of developing an inclusive epistemology that challenges Global North-dominated narratives. Shaping an equitable ecosystem requires a proactive approach—one that not only responds to existing structures but actively redefines them. 

As we continue this journey, our focus remains on disrupting entrenched power structures, strengthening Global South leadership and narratives, ensuring that critical global conversations reflect diverse lived realities rather than imposed frameworks.

[Explore other stories from our collection on transforming research collaboration and engage with ideas envisioning a more equitable future for research. ]

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