Integration and Implementation Insights
A community blog and repository of resources for improving research impact on complex real-world problems
By William L. Allen
When researchers want to engage or work with groups outside universities—especially civil society organisations—what should they consider as part of this process?
Civil society comprises organisations—large and small—that are outside of the public and private sectors. These include non-governmental organisations, charities, or voluntary groups.
Three lessons emerged from asking civil society organisations what they would tell academics who want to work with them:
By Diana Rose
Outcome measures in research about treatment and service provision may not seem a particularly controversial or even exciting domain for citizen involvement. Although the research landscape is changing – partly as a result of engaging stakeholders in knowledge production and its effects – the design of outcome measures has been largely immune to these developments.
The standard way of constructing such measures – for evaluating treatment outcomes and services – has serious flaws and requires an alternative that grounds them firmly in the experiences and situations of the people whose views are being solicited.
By Gerald Midgley
How can we design new services or strategies when the participation of marginalized stakeholders is vital to ethicality? How can we liberate people’s creativity so we can move from incremental improvements to more fundamental change?
To answer these questions, I have brought together insights from Russ Ackoff and Werner Ulrich to develop a new method that I call Critical Back-Casting.
Russ Ackoff, writing in the 1980s, is critical of organizations that focus on incremental improvements without ever asking whether they are doing the right thing in the first place. Thus, they are at risk of continually ‘improving’ the wrong thing, when they would be better off going for a more radical redesign. Ackoff makes two far-reaching prescriptions to tackle this problem.
By Rebecca Jordan and Steven Gray
As investigators who engage the public in both modeling and research endeavors we address two major questions: Does citizen science have a place within the participatory modeling research community? And does participatory modeling have a place in the citizen science research community?
Let us start with definitions. Citizen science has been defined in many ways, but we will keep the definition simple. Citizen science refers to endeavors where persons who do not consider themselves scientific experts work with those who do consider themselves experts (around a specific issue) to address an authentic research question.
By Melissa Robson
It seems simple enough to say that community values and aspirations should be central to informing government decisions that affect them. But simple things can turn out to be complex.
In particular, when research to inform land and water policy was guided by what the community valued and aspired to rather than solely technical considerations, a much broader array of desirable outcomes was considered and the limitations of what science can measure and predict were usefully exposed.
By Doug Easterling
How can collaborative groups move past their divisions and find solutions that advance their shared notions of what would be good for the community?
Complex problems – such as how to expand access to high-quality health care, how to reduce poverty, how to remedy racial disparities in educational attainment and economic opportunity, and how to promote economic development while at the same time protecting natural resources – can’t be solved with technical remedies or within a narrow mindset. They require the sort of multi-disciplinary, nuanced analysis that can only be achieved by engaging a variety of stakeholders in a co-creative process.
Bringing together stakeholders with diverse perspectives allows for a comprehensive analysis of complex problems, but this also raises the risk of a divisive process.
By Charles M. Lines
Occasionally, asking your collaborators about other people and organisations to involve in the joint work may make you aware of ‘taboo triangles’. These occur when currently collaborating people or organisations feel uncomfortable with or even unable to countenance a certain person, group or organisation being invited into their existing relationships.
It is worth exploring the reasons for and stories behind these warning signs or taboos. Are they valid? Are they erected by traditions that have become unquestioned rules? Are they in reality a barrier which seeks to restrict access to some form of power, influence or sought after resource? Are they based upon assumptions and preconceptions rather than reality?
Above all, are they worth taking the risk of challenging or even ignoring?
By Jeff Foote
How can non-indigenous researchers work with indigenous communities to tackle complex socio-ecological issues in a way that is culturally appropriate and does not contribute to the marginalisation of indigenous interests and values?
These questions have long been considered by participatory action researchers, and are of growing relevance to mainstream science organisations, which are increasingly utilising cross-cultural research practices in recognition of the need to move beyond identifying ‘problems’ to finding ‘solutions’.
As an example, I borrow heavily from work with colleagues in a partnership involving the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (a government science institute), Hokianga Health Enterprise Trust (a local community owned health service) and the Hokianga community.
By Rawiri Smith
Collaboration is important in New Zealand as a method of bringing communities together to work on complex problems. A useful collaborative model is the Powhiri, practiced by Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, for hundreds of years.
The formal welcome to an area in New Zealand is a Maori process known as the Powhiri. The Powhiri recognises the mana of all the participants. One of the most important values of the Maori people is manaaki, or caring for the mana of everyone. The Maori word mana means the importance associated with a person. The performance of a Powhiri acknowledges the importance of a person being welcomed to an area.
The deeper meaning behind the Powhiri process gives more meaning and indicates what should be occurring through the Powhiri.
By Jane Palmer
Storytelling ethnography is a valuable tool if your research traverses several disciplines and aims for insights that transcend all of them. Stories not only integrate knowledge from diverse disciplines, but can also “change the way people act, the way they use available knowledge” (Griffiths 2007).
The special qualities of transdisciplinarity are:
These are also qualities of what I call storytelling ethnography.
By Graeme Nicholas
How can people with quite different ways of ‘seeing’ and thinking about a problem discover and negotiate these differences?
A key element of co-creation is joint problem definition. However, problem definition is likely to be a matter of perspective, or a matter of how each person involved ‘frames’ the problem. Differing frames are inevitable when participants bring their differing expertise and experience to a problem. Methods and processes to support co-creation, then, need to manage the coming together of people with differing ways of framing the problem, so participants can contribute to joint problem definition.
An English version of this post is available
Si ud tuviera que elegir un conjunto de textos clave sobre la interdisciplina para traducir a otro idioma y utilizarlos en un grupo de discusión, ¿cuáles serían? Esa fue la tarea que nos propusimos en el Espacio Interdisciplinario de la Universidad de la República (UdelaR) en Uruguay.
Elegimos once textos que capturan la diversidad de enfoques sobre la interdisciplina y que también constituyen un punto de referencia para la producción académica.