Alternative Justice Systems: New Frontiers for Legal and Social Science Scholarship, Praxis and Pedagogy

by Professor Gabrielle Lynch, Warwick University

The National Steering Committee for the Implementation of the Alternative Justice Systems (AJS) Policy (NaSCI-AJS) in Kenya is spearheading a coordinated effort to reimagine and entrench AJS as a central pillar of access to justice in Kenya. These efforts are rooted in the recognition of Kenya’s rich traditions of organic, community-based justice, the constitutional imperatives of people-centred justice under Article 159 of the Constitution, and the global discourse on innovative, people-centred inclusive pathways to justice. Through the development and validation of County AJS Action Plans (CAPs), the training of AJS champions, and sustained engagement with Court Users Committees, NaSCI-AJS has moved beyond normative advocacy to practical implementation, demonstrating AJS as both a scalable modality of justice delivery and a philosophical-epistemic project.

Kenya’s AJS model represents one of the most ambitious contemporary efforts to institutionalize people-centred, multi-door justice within a constitutional framework.

Despite growing interest, scholarship and teaching on AJS remain relatively underdeveloped in Kenya and the wider region. As a result, there is urgent need for sustained dialogue between practitioners, legal scholars, and social scientists to interrogate AJS conceptual foundations and critiques, surface emerging research questions, explore pedagogies for embedding AJS in legal and social science curricula, and enrich comparative perspectives positioning post-colonial global debates on plural justice systems.

Given this context, NaSCI-AJS, in partnership with the African Judiciaries Research Network (AJRN), convened a workshop on 7 November, 2025 at the The British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in Nairobi to critically take stock of its implementation journey and to catalyse a new research and pedagogical agenda on AJS, bringing into conversation practitioners, legal scholars, and social scientists from across the region. With BIEA support, the organisers were able to bring together members of NaSCI-AJS with AJS practitioners and legal scholars from Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zambia.

The discussions revealed both the depth of interest in AJS and persistent conceptual misunderstandings — even among legal scholars — and underscored the urgency of mainstreaming AJS into legal education.

Participants emphasized the need to move beyond elective modules toward embedding AJS as a foundational component of legal training, while also identifying a rich pipeline of research questions at the intersection of law, society, and plural justice systems.

This meeting followed a separate workshop organised by NaSCI-AJS and AJRN on 6 November, 2025, again at the BIEA in Nairobi, on public opinion of the courts at which Prof. Karuti Kanyinga (University of Nairobi) and Prof. Gabrielle Lynch (University of Warwick) presented a report based on multiple rounds of the Afrobarometer survey and more focused survey data. The report was welcomed by participants who engaged in a frank discussion of public perceptions, challenges, and possible ways forward. The workshop further contributed to an ongoing dialogue between empirical research, judicial practice, and policy reform in Kenya’s justice sector.  Following this successful meeting, Lynch was invited to the annual Human Rights Summit of the Judges of the High Court of Kenya in December 2025 to present the same.