Naming Justice, Practising Advocacy: A Scoping Review of Social-Justice and Social Transformation

Abstract

Social-justice and advocacy are frequently invoked together, yet social-justice theory and advocacy-focused empirical literature rarely engage, leaving their relationship underexamined despite its importance to social transformation. This interdisciplinary review addresses that gap, examining how the two are conceptualised, practised, and connected to social transformation across theology, human rights, development studies, education, social work, political science, and law. Guided by the JBI scoping review's PCC framework (Peters et al., 2020), it pursued five objectives: comparing theoretical traditions, mapping frameworks connecting them, classifying advocacy's forms, actors, and strategies, mapping outcomes for justice-relevant change, and identifying evidence and conceptual gaps. A PRISMA-ScR–guided search (2 September 2026; 2020–2026 window) yielded 1,452 records: 33 retained as primary evidence, one as background literature,   excluded with documented reasons at full-text screening. Social-justice is theorised through twelve-plus traditions distributive, capability-based, recognition-redistribution-representation, structural-injustice, intersectional, virtue-ethical, theologically grounded while advocacy spans individual to transnational scales, underscoring the theory–practice divergence; evidence of its justice-relevant outcomes remains sparse. Global South and African representation remain a corpus minority; the review cannot tell indexing bias from a genuine publishing gap, a question for future research. The evidence supports no linear pathway from justice diagnosis to advocacy to transformation, only a fragmented, multidirectional, context-dependent relationship. It proposes a provisional synthesis, a heuristic for future research and practice rather than a validated causal model, and identifies priorities for future theoretical, empirical, and Global South-led scholarship. Justice-oriented practice, it suggests, depends less on theory than on deliberately coupling theory and advocacy within capable institutions.