Why This Conversation Now?
Feminist research plays a vital role in generating knowledge, shaping advocacy, and informing policy, especially decisions aimed at ending violence against women and girls (EVAWG) and gender-diverse people. Yet far too often, those closest to the frontlines – feminist activists, organisers, practitioners, and researchers rooted in communities – are the least resourced, least heard, and most burdened by extractive research practices.
Power and funding continue to determine who asks the questions, sets the agenda, whose knowledge is recognised, and what counts as “evidence.” The people doing the hardest, boldest, and most transformative work are often the last to be funded and the first to be cut.
Funding and development systems, including donor institutions, philanthropic actors, and international agencies, often reproduce the very power imbalances they aim to dismantle. They reinforce extractive practices, short-term project cycles, and gatekeeping around what is recognised as legitimate evidence.
COFEM’s Feminist Research Working Group is committed to shifting this paradigm. Our collective centres feminist, intersectional, and decolonial values, grounded in context-specific lived realities and the everyday knowledge of feminist movements. In April 2025, we convened a reflective focus group with over 14 members from across regions, disciplines, and identities who are actively contributing to feminist research in EVAWG. Together, we explored how funding and power influence our work, how extractive dynamics can be challenged, and what it would take to reimagine funding systems rooted in trust, autonomy, and accountability.
Who Sets the Agenda? Power and Priorities in EVAWG Research
The question of what gets researched and what doesn’t is often determined by institutions with decision-making and agenda-setting power. The global research agenda continues to be steered by the same actors who hold structural and economic power: donors, governments of the Global North, INGOs, IGOs, and established academic and research institutions.
While some of the research funded by these actors is undoubtedly necessary for the EVAWG field, such as studies on legal frameworks, criminalisation of violence or service provision, these agendas often do not centre the priorities, knowledges, and lived experiences of affected communities. As a result, the focus remains on practicalities and technical solutions, rather than exploring and challenging root causes, power dynamics, and community-led strategies to end violence. This raises critical questions about whose knowledge is considered important, valid, and “researchable.”
As one member put it, “What gets funded is what the donor wants.” Another member added that they had seen donor/funder interests steer the research agenda, from priorities and objectives to methods to tools. This donor-driven reality skews research objectives from pursuing essential and/or imaginative work towards fulfilling funder expectations.
Skewing this further, the “professionalisation” of EVAWG research drives and heavily favours North America and Europe-based researchers. The geographic disparity in the state of development research publications between 1990 and 2019 is staggering, with no signs of improvement over the period. Only 16% of the articles published in the top 20 development journals were by Global South researchers. Global North researchers held 73% of the publications that came out of research done on the Global South (Amarante et al, 2022). North American and European funders and institutions continue to hold disproportionate power, especially over research in the Global South. Universities in these regions attract the most funding and define the academic canon, leaving local researchers, grassroots organisations and marginalised voices with barriers to influence. Literature and knowledge remain dominated by Global North authors, often at the expense of diverse lived experiences.
This filtering is also visible in the operational structures of funding: administrative burdens and rigid project requirements drain capacity from already under-resourced groups. There is little time, space, or funding to accommodate the emotional toll of this work.
Additionally, those who control funding and agendas for research also shape how violence is understood and addressed. When only funders define what constitutes as violence, critical forms of harm rooted in sociocultural and political contexts risk being overlooked. For example, caste-based violence in South Asia or the compound violence that results from intersecting forms of discrimination may not align with the Global North framing of violence, and can remain under-researched or wilfully sidelined. To holistically and effectively approach EVAWG, we need to integrate more local and diverse voices.
Even within feminist movements, there is growing tension between what is “fundable” and what is “transformative”. To genuinely advance justice, we must stop designing research to fit donor expectations and instead challenge donors to fund research that reflects feminist realities. This means redistributing not just funds, but power:
- Elevating community-based knowledge and methodologies.
- Trusting and resourcing researchers and organisations closest to the issues.
- Funding uncomfortable questions and topics.
- Supporting and financing Black, disabled, queer, non-binary, intersectional, Indigenous, sex worker, queer, trans, and Global South perspectives in research.
- Creating space to acknowledge, hold and heal from the emotional labour this work demands.
- Actively and systematically working to dismantle barriers created by language, political agendas, mainstream frameworks, overlooking diversity, and marginalising experiences of violence.
Tensions Between Feminist Values and Funding Realities
The friction between funder priorities and feminist research values is a tricky and often unfair space to navigate. At the level of thought and direction, many donors dictate the terms, tools, and methods of research. One of our members reflected on interactions with funders and wondered whether funders use research to “source answers” that align with their agenda, rather than approaching it from a place of curiosity, learning, and openness.
Donor-driven constraints restrict the imagination of feminist practitioners. When global actors set the agenda for feminist work in contradiction with feminist values, the resulting tensions trickle down to the day-to-day work. One member noted that their work has been overlooked due to their focus on Black women, as opposed to the fiscally palatable approach of working “for all women”.
A related concern is the growing trend of donors prioritising research framed as innovative or cutting-edge. While such framing can attract visibility and funding, it often creates incentives to pursue novelty over nuance, sometimes at the expense of safety, ethics, or community accountability.
Beyond funding priorities, many members also identified operational demands as a major source of tension. Rushed timelines, heavy administrative demands, and insufficient space for reflection and strategy restrict the depth and quality of feminist work. These constraints redirect energy toward compliance over care.
Transformative, community-led feminist research requires funding models that overcome entrenched barriers, such as short-term cycles, rigid bureaucracies, political resistance, and exclusion of Global South researchers through language or geography. Members called for trust-based, community-led funding that offers researchers freedom, prioritises long-term investment, ensures accountability to communities, and centres marginalised voices through equitable, decolonised funding approaches.
Whose Voices Are Left Out, and Why?
When looking at which voices are missing or underrepresented, we must also look at centring and power. Power tends to be granted to those with platforms, access to legitimised networks, and fluency in donor language.
Across the global funding ecosystem, the persistent underrepresentation of Black, non-binary, disabled, intersectional, and grassroots-led groups reveals an intentional pattern of exclusion. These voices are filtered out by systems historically calibrated to reward what feels safe, familiar, and quantifiable to the Global North.
A deep, unspoken bias favours polished proposals over lived experiences, controlled studies over context-rich storytelling, and quantifiable over qualitative. Feminist, embodied, and community-rooted methodologies are often seen as anecdotal or soft, even though they best capture the realities of structural violence, intergenerational harm, and the slow, deliberate work of liberation.
Funding priorities still reflect structural racism, ableism, and anti-Blackness, visible in what consistently gets funding and what doesn’t. While the language of equity is gaining traction, it rarely translates into long-term, trust-based investments that give silenced voices and knowledge the time and safety to take root.
As a result, critical and complex issues at the intersection of EVAWG, like colonial legacies embedded in violence or structural inequities, remain under-researched. These topics are often deemed “complicated”, “too political”, or “unpalatable” for donors or general audiences. Work centring Black women, non-binary people, or grassroots leadership is filtered out too often, not because it lacks relevance, but because it disrupts the status quo.
To change what gets funded, we must change what we value. That includes redefining what counts as important, what qualifies as data, and who is allowed to speak with authority.
Alternatives: What Could Feminist Funding Look Like?
What would it mean to fund feminist research like we fund movements—with trust, care, and a commitment to long-term change?
For too long, funding for EVAWG research has mirrored hierarchical and extractive models, where knowledge is only valued if it’s measurable, packaged, and tied to rigid outcomes. But feminist research is relational, iterative, and rooted in community. It cannot thrive in systems that prioritise control over collaboration.
Members shared bold ideas and examples of alternative feminist resourcing models. They pointed to a promising opportunity for a deeper collective exploration and future collaboration. These included:
- Trust-based, equitable, and flexible funding that recognises the time, relationships, and labour involved in community-centred research, and supports it long term.
- Participatory grantmaking, where those most impacted by violence and exclusion have the power to decide how funds are allocated.
- Giving as solidarity, not charity, i.e., supporting others’ work as peers through donations or shared resources, even beyond formal funding structures.
- Building alliances with grantmakers to reshape funding models from within and open space for feminist approaches to take root.
- Creating ecosystems of collaboration where research is interconnected with healing justice, narrative change, arts and culture, advocacy, and movement-building.
Ideas also included solidarity funding networks and collaborative funding pools, where multiple stakeholders contribute and collectively decide how funds are distributed. Members also highlighted co-research and knowledge-sharing models that treat researchers and communities as equal collaborators, sharing expertise, co-creating knowledge, and valuing lived experiences. These approaches challenge traditional research hierarchies by centring local knowledge and prioritising relational, community-led ways of working.
Reimagining feminist funding isn’t only about redistributing money: it’s about redistributing power and re-rooting research in the everyday wisdom, strategies, and resistance of those closest to the struggle.
Practices of Resistance and Care
Members shared strategies for resisting extractive and instrumentalist research practices. While acknowledging the difficulty, they recommended naming and collectively refusing such practices. Dedicated support groups and strategy exchanges can deepen collective refusal.
For groups and individuals who are able to set the agenda, it is essential that EVAWG research remains survivor-centred and participatory. Feminist researchers can support one another through collective accountability, knowledge sharing, and co-research, as well as by championing alternative forms of knowledge rooted in community-based knowledge outside mainstream academic spaces.
A strong recommendation emerged to celebrate “good grants.” Participants valued honouring good funding models and grants that create an environment for feminist work to thrive. Sharing knowledge and building resources on these funding models could broaden funders’ imaginations and give feminists hope. This is a meaningful step as we continue the conversation.
In the face of the current funding freeze and various barriers outside of it, members return to the “why” of their work to sustain and stay rooted in feminist principles. While funding severely impacts work, remembering that movement work is essential and predates donor funding serves to remind us of movement resilience–how far we have come and how much further we will go.
Staying grounded in feminist values often means reminding oneself that meaningful change takes time. Short-term gains are not worth pursuing if they come at the cost of integrity and harm to the community.
This Blog was written By Meena C., Pupul Lama, and Tiia Manninen, members of the COFEM Research Working Group
Reference: Amarante, V., Burger, R., Chelwa, G., Cockburn, J., Kassouf, A., McKay, A., & Zurbrigg, J. (2022). Underrepresentation of developing country researchers in development research. Applied economics letters, 29(17), 1659-1664.
