Rethinking Research Impact through Principles for Fair and Equitable Partnerships

Abstract

With renewed investment of the UK's official development assistance (ODA) commitment into research, there is a need to rethink traditional understandings of 'research impact'. In this article, we argue that impact in ODA-funded research should go beyond translating research findings into practice and policy or implementing research in partnership with research mediators/users. Instead, development agendas of those living and working in the global South, including academics and practitioners, and those working in international non-governmental organisations should influence the research agendas, approaches, and schemes that allocate funding. These stakeholders have profound knowledge of what real-world impact looks like, the types of impact needed, local and national realities, and how complex processes of development impact unfold. Drawing on a programme of research conducted by the Rethinking Research Collaborative, we examine eight principles for 'fair and equitable research partnerships' using insights from our individual experiences to offer new thinking on ODA-funded research impact.

Beyond partnerships: embracing complexity to understand and improve research collaboration for global development

“…Likewise, a commitment to emergence sits in tension with the boundaries of funded activities and suggests the need to understand research and especially impact, not just in relation to a single project but as part of a longer-term collective agenda which might evolve across several projects, teams, outputs and events. This challenges current practices of attribution, suggesting a need for a new approach to impact assessment (Newman, Bharadwaj, and Fransman 2019). Other points of emergence included self-regulation of the UKRI's global challenge research agenda and of the RRC itself as a legitimate and increasingly influential entity within the knowledge-for-development state space, and self-organisation of UKRI's research activity with greater attention to "fair and equitable collaboration" and of the RRC as a network with newly identified partners (including Southern-based research funders and capacity providers).…”

“…The first RRC Principle ("Put Poverty First") was framed by a preoccupation with "starting conditions". Research should be grounded in existing efforts to act on poverty (see Newman, Bharadwaj, and Fransman 2019) and by linking research and practice, collaboration should be a vehicle to achieve this. As with the RQ+ tool, this principle was intended to act as an explicit recognition of the values and assumptions that frame the RRC approach.…”

Repurposing NGO data for better research outcomes: a scoping review of the use and secondary analysis of NGO data in health policy and systems research

“…By not attributing the NGO directly, inequalities of knowledge and power between NGOs and research organisations, multilevel or network organisations such as WHO, the UN, World Bank and are upheld [53]. This failure to attribute research to NGOs was also seen when the Global Health Watch Report 4 [191], which has NGO and NGO network co-authors (e.g.…”

“…Concerns include time and funding for collaboration, lack of methodological rigour and poor data quality [18,51,52]. For example, the timeframes of academics and NGOs can differ as the NGOs often prioritise developing trust and collaboration with the patient group whilst academics may be more concerned with data collection over a short time period [53]. Another example is the pragmatic data collection that NGOs tend to employ, rather than being concept or research-question driven.…”

Cooperation, collaboration and compromise: learning through difference and diversity

“…Partnership between organisations has been increasingly encouraged by funding agencies and research councils as a way of ensuring more responsive, sustainable and multiperspective research outcomes and impacts (see for instance Fransman et al 2021;Newman, Bharadwaj, and Fransman 2019). Whether between universities, policy organisations and/or practitioners, such collaboration is often seen to be a matter of identifying complementary skills and networks and establishing common goals.…”