Talking about co-design and stakeholder engagement is one thing. Knowing how to do it is another. While organisations and universities like to make engagement central to their work, institutional practices are not keeping pace. Institutional policies, publishing pressures, and additional time needed stand in the way. Building capacity for engaged research is more than knowing how to run a focus group.
Engaged research embeds stakeholder views throughout the life of the research project. It encourages creation, and active collaboration with policy makers, practitioners and communities.
A workshop was held mid 2024 to bring together research leaders with hands-on experiences. These are people who are keen to see their research improve things for society and individuals. They see this as a timely opportunity for key people to coordinate their efforts. The result is a large volume published by the National Academies Press containing the workshop discussions and ideas.
Partnering with communities, policy makers and others is challenging. Measuring the impact of such research requires a suitable evaluation system.
The book of proceedings has 8 chapters:
- Introduction
- Importance of engaged researach
- Challenges and solutions: synthesising two landscape reviews
- Promising approaches for addressing key tensions in community engaged research
- Aligning mission and incentives: valuing and prioritizing engaged research
- Valuing diverse forms of expertise
- Aligning core values and measurements
- Next steps for action
The title of the publication is, Building Institutional Capacity for Engaged Research. You can read free online. Note this is an academic text with long sentences.
From the introduction
The complex challenges facing society today call for new ways of doing research that bring researchers, policy makers, community leaders and members, industry stakeholders, and others together. The aim is to identify evidence needs, contribute different kinds of knowledge and expertise, and use evidence to accomplish shared goals.
Although momentum is building toward a research enterprise that more routinely enables and rewards this type of collaboration, the development of institutional capacities to support diverse forms of engaged research have not kept pace with the need for them.