Decolonial regulatory legitimacy: ubuntu and the governance of gender-based violence in South Africa

South Africa is widely regarded as a constitutional success story, yet gender-based violence (GBV) persists despite extensive legislative reform, institutional innovation and sustained engagement with international human rights regimes. Existing scholarship largely attributes this persistence to implementation failures or weak institutional capacity. This article advances a different explanation. It argues that the governance of GBV remains shaped by the coloniality of regulation: enduring hierarchies that determine whose knowledge counts, whose experiences define regulatory priorities, and how institutional legitimacy is produced. Bringing decentred regulation into conversation with decolonial theory, the article demonstrates that South Africa’s gender governance regime is formally polycentric but epistemically stratified. Although regulatory authority is dispersed across state institutions, civil society organisations, international actors and community initiatives, legitimacy continues to be anchored in Euro-modern legal rationality, technocratic measurement and criminal justice institutions. Through an analysis of constitutional jurisprudence, institutional responses to GBV and the treatment of ubuntu, the article shows how relational understandings of justice are acknowledged symbolically but remain marginal to regulatory design and evaluation. The article contends that polycentric governance alone cannot decolonise regulation. Without transforming the epistemic foundations through which authority and success are defined, institutional pluralism risks reproducing colonial hierarchies across an expanded network of regulatory actors.