The Rethinking Research Collaborative (RRC) was an international network of networks including research organisations, civil society organisations, social movements, international NGOs and research brokers, training providers and funders who were committed to working together to explore the politics of participation in knowledge for international development and to encourage more inclusive and responsive collaboration in order to produce more relevant research.

Founded through an ESRC-funded seminar series in 2014, a network-building and agenda-setting grant from the Open University in 2017 and a grant from UKRI for strategic research to inform fairer and more equitable research collaboration in the context of their Oversees Development Assistance (ODA) funded research, the RRC evolved from a UK-focussed network (with core partners including The Open University, Christian Aid, INTRAC, Bond and UKCDR) to an international movement (with partners including the UNESCO Chair programme in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education, Global Development Network, Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), Praxis Institute for Participatory Practices, MS TCDC and the pan-African social movement Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity.)

In 2019 the RRC was awarded first prize for ‘Best External Research Collaboration’ at the Open University’s 50th Birthday Research Awards. We produced a series of influential Principles for Fair and Equitable Research Collaborations, publications on ‘Evidence and the Politics of Participation‘, ‘Rethinking Research Impact‘ and ‘Moving Beyond Partnership with Systems Thinking and Complexity Theory‘ a series of high-impact learning resources and reports for funders such as UKRI and network organisations such as Bond.

Building on our collective commitment to decolonising international development as well as our research which increasingly called into question the value of ‘research partnerships’ over and above more sustained investment in research systems in the global South, in 2021 we took the decision to disband the RRC as an expert network and instead to support the ongoing work of our southern-based partners. Please refer to the work of the UNESCO Chair programme in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education, Global Development Network, Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), Praxis Institute for Participatory Practices, MS TCDC, Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity and Southern Voice for ongoing commentary on research collaboration for international development.

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Joining the RRC

Since our launch we have been inundated with requests to join the collaborative and have received information about numerous initiatives aimed at understanding and improving research collaboration or knowledge mobilisation in different areas of research, policy and practice; different types of institution; and different countries around the world. We have added links to many of these initiatives on our resources page and will continue to update this list so please let us know if there are further resources you would like us to include.

We are currently undergoing a planning phase as we develop the next phase of the collaborative’s work, which is likely to focus on the following components:

  • Capacity strengthening initiatives to support research collaboration and broader processes of collaborative knowledge mobilisation;
  • Networking and brokering to help bring together different resources, initiatives, stakeholder groups and communities of practice;
  • Critical engagement with the global politics of knowledge and in particular, exploring the implications of research funded by Oversees Development Assistance (ODA) on rethinking ODA-complient researchers, research institutions, processes and systems

If you would like to join the collaborative, please complete the following form and let us know how you would like to be involved:

RRC partner details

 

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