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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Survey analysis

The purpose of this survey was to inform the planning of the first (context-setting) seminar and the framings of the series as a whole. An initial thematic-cluster analysis was conducted based on 38 responses, however, the survey remains open until the day before the first seminar: 25th February 2015

The survey was structured around the following three sections:

  • Motivations and expectations for the seminar series (including assumptions to interrogate)
  • Experience of research partnerships
  • Use of evidence

Motivations and expectations

QUESTION: Why are you interested in participating in the series?

1. Improving current practice

  • identifying good practice/principles for partnership
  • reflecting on previous practice
  • learning from different perspectives (across organisations and sectors)

2. Conceptual interest in the topic

  • unpacking hierarchies of knowledge/evidence regimes
  • concern about what evidence is valued
  • concern with misuses of evidence
  • interest in dominance of Northern-led evidence
  • interest in dynamics of participation
  • interest in interdisciplinarity
  • interest in the role of Higher Education in development

3. Interest in capacity building

  • improving the organisation’s research portfolio
  • identifying key research literacies/skills
  • knowing where to invest research
  • understanding different ways of disseminating (e.g. academic publication v policy brief)
  • improving impact/civil-society engagement in Higher Education
  • supporting students

QUESTION: What are your expectations/hopes for this seminar series?

1. Better conceptual understanding of partnerships

  • identifying challenges
  • identifying markers of success
  • identifying the full range of evidence its possible to produce
  • understanding of role of partnership in wider debates around HE/impact

2. Mobilising a common project

  • becoming part of a new network/community of interest
  • feeling solidarity with others struggling with similar issues
  • developing a collective response to common challenge

3. Dialogue

  • Space for critical reflection
  • Understanding expectations of other partners
  • Learning from different sectors

4. Outputs

  • developing a “how to” of partnership
  • developing resources to share with policy-makers to inspire/focus attention and contribute to ‘high level dialogue’

QUESTION: List any assumptions/stereotypes about research partnerships that you would like to unpack

1. Labels

  • the terms ‘academics’ and ‘practitioners’ (and policy makers) are meaningful (clear, homogenous etc.)

2. Skills/knowledge

  • Practitioners can’t be researchers (don’t have research skills/knowledge)
  • NGOs provide the data and universities the theory – or NGOs provide the populations under study and academics provide the brains.
  • Academics can solve NGOs problems surrounding evidence
  • Practitioners respond to academic knowledge as if it is superior to their own, even if they have lots of experiential evidence that their knowledge is valid.
  • Northern institutions have a stronger academic discipline than southern institutions

3. Theory/practice

  • Theory is academic and abstract, it is separate from practice and does not emerge through or from practice (or underlie practice), it is an absolute.
  • Academics down-play theory when working with NGOs
  • Academic research is too theoretical to be useful

4. Language

  • NGOs and academics speak different languages
  • NGOs (and donors) simplify the research questions, whereas academics are more comfortable with complexity

5. Ways of working/relationships/personalities

  • Academics are ego driven, NGO staff collaborative
  • NGOs are closer to people on the ground, and understand local people and their context, whereas academics are distance and detached
  • Academics are in the driving seat of these ‘research’ partnerships
  • Academics are so slow, NGOs are just go go go

6. Agendas/values

  • NGOs do research as a means to an end, whereas academics see research as open exploration or an end in itself.
  • NGOs care about social change, academics only care about the research question
  • Evaluation and research are distinct

7. Partnership

  • That partnerships are always positive
  • The differences in agenda, time-frames, motivations etc. are insurmountable

Experience of research partnerships

QUESTION: What factors have in your experience contributed to good participation in partnerships?

1. Common goals/understandings

  • clear/shared understandings of terms/language/ideas
  • clear/shared/tangible agenda
  • shared politics/values
  • clear/shared understanding of roles/responsibilities

2. Explicit participatory process :

  • commitment to co-production
  • shared credit for partnership’s accomplishments
  • shared ownership of branding and outputs
  • good communication
  • critical reflection throughout
  • explicit recognition of power dynamics
  • openness to learning
  • willingness to admit mistakes/compromise

3. Good relations

  • Trust
  • Respect
  • Honesty
  • Face-to-face contact
  • Understanding of different institutional constraints on both sides

4. Commitment

  • Interest and enthusiasm on both sides
  • Time to commit
  • Adequate (and equitable) funding
  • Delivering on objectives
  • Institutional support so that the work is valued

5. Appropriate skills

  • Professionalism
  • good management/planning/experienced coordinator
  • appropriate research skills

6. A learning/training/capacity-building component

QUESTION: What factors have in your experience posed challenges to participation in partnerships?

1. Conflicting goals/understandings/languages/values

2. Poor communication/relations

  • lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities
  • insufficient/irregular/unstructured communication
  • failure to re-think
  • bad relations/mistrust

3. Power imbalances

  • hierarchies of ‘expertise’
  • unequal ownership of partnership
  • tokenistic partner involvement (e.g. invitations to potential Southern partners after project has started)

4. Lack of commitment

  • lack of enthusiasm
  • lack of time to commit

5. Logistics

  • conflicting time-scales
  • different institutional capacities/infrastructures (e.g. internet)
  • different time zones
  • inadequate funding

6. Rigid funding requirements

  • outputs preempting research design
  • partnership based on opportunistic funding rather than genuine need
  • Inequitable allocation of resources
  • Micro-management by funders/donors
  • ‘consultancy culture’ or ‘subcontracting’ types of partnerships favour alienated/individual ways of working and focus more on deliverables than process

7. Lack of skills/capacity

  • Unqualified/underperforming partners
  • lack of research capacity/skills/rigour
  • bad management/poor planning

use of evidence

QUESTION: What are the most valuable types of evidence you draw on in your work?

Interviews/focus groups (47)

Evaluation reports (38)

Academic research (33)

Personal testimony/direct experience/observation (17)

Policy Briefs (16)

Statistical databases (15)

Systematic reviews (9)

Collaborative Action Research (8)

Newsletters/bulletins (4)

Public archives (3)

Visual data (2)

Media articles (2)

Research resources – supporting methodology (1)

Workshop documentation (1)

QUESTION: What are the least useful types of evidence to your work?

Statistical databases

  • messy/unreliable
  • reductionist/miss nuance
  • decontextualized/depoliticized
  • obscure voices /
  • inaccessible without advanced skills
  • (but useful as ‘background data’)

Personal testimony/anecdote

  • not seen as legitimate/rigorous
  • needs additional research to back-up
  • less useful to central offices though can provide ‘powerful stories’

Public archives

  • takes time to access
  • no ‘quality control’
  • less relevant to contemporary research

Media articles

  • developed for other purposes (different agenda) so not research
  • “fiction agents” / biased
  • over-simplistic
  • (though may help to identify emerging issues)

Academic research

  • can be detached from practice and over-theoretical
  • lack of time to read lengthy articles
  • inaccessible

Evaluation

  • makes grand claims/ too much focus on the positive (fundraising agendas)
  • not generalizable
  • often lack rigour
  • Is this research???

Newsletters/bulletins

  • not research
  • “too slick”
  • but can provide helpful links to other resources

Visual data

  • not compatible with report format

Interview/FG

  • no capacity (“time and academic skill”) to collect/analyse

GENERAL COMMENTS:

  • Need for triangulation across different sources of evidence
  • Type of evidence will depend on nature of task

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