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.

HOME

Engaging research for practice: a civil society perspective

This study (led by Jude Fransman from the Open University and funded  by an Early Career Fellowship award from the Leverhulme Trust) examined how international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in the UK’s international development sector ‘engage’ with research. Research engagement was defined to include any of the following activities: contributing to research agenda-setting and governance; commissioning, informing or collaborating with research led by other organisations; producing and communicating research in-house; and/or accessing/adapting/using pre-existing research).

The study had five main components:

1. Desk-based systematic review (conceptual metasynthesis) of ‘research engagement’ in 5 different UK-based sectors of policy and practice

2. 3. Key informant interviews on the changing nature of research within the UK’s international development sector

3. Institutional case studies of INGOs to explore their policies, processes, practices and systems around research engagement

4. Participatory multimodal journaling with INGO-researchers over a 6-12 month period to explore the research identities and identify researcher development needs

5. Resource-development to build research capacity in INGOs (in collaboration with INTRAC and BOND)