Processes

Researcher motivations affect equitable collaboration with local and indigenous peoples

By Roxana Roos.

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Roxana Roos (biography)

What motivates researchers in choosing to work with local and indigenous communities? How do these motivations shape how much say local and indigenous people actually get in the research that affects them? What do researchers need to do to ensure that collaboration is equitable?

Here, I describe two clusters of motivations.

The first cluster revolves around verbs such as “understand,” “collect,” “study,” and “know.” Researchers in this group are largely driven by personal interest, curiosity, and a professional identity (“I am an anthropologist. It is my job to find out how people live”). Here, the researcher is the active party: they interview, observe, analyze, and publish. The local and indigenous people, on the other hand, play a more passive role; their practices and narratives are studied rather than being part of a partnership.

The second cluster revolves around verbs such as “exchange,” “develop,” and “collaborate.” Researchers in this cluster present the need for research as something that can only be met through collaboration, where local and indigenous communities contribute initiative, ideas, and relevant knowledge to define and solve a shared, complex problem.

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The multidimensional process of co-creation: Five consistent dimensions

By Katrina Messiha.

katrina-messiha
Katrina Messiha (biography)

How can we avoid co-creation being used as a general term for any form of stakeholder engagement? Are there key dimensions that co-creation processes should aim to consider? 

Based on analysis across 9 research fields, several types of co-creation and explicit theories, colleagues and I (Messiha et al., 2025) argue that co-creation is a multidimensional process, with five dimensions:

  1. Multi-stakeholder collaborative action;
  2. Process of co-learning towards innovation;
  3. Contextual knowledge production;
  4. Generating meaning; and
  5. Open, trustful and inclusive dialogue.

These dimensions offer a conceptual tool for planning, examining and strengthening co-creation research.

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Fulfillment, balance and process: Co-active coaching principles for team science

By Joanna Kaniewska and Gemma Jiang.

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1. Joanna Kaniewska (biography)
2. Gemma Jiang (biography)

What is Co-Active Coaching and how can it be applied in teams?

Co-Active Coaching (Kimsey-House et al., 2018) is a coaching method built on the premise that people are naturally creative, resourceful, and capable of finding their own answers. Rather than acting as an expert or trainer who gives solutions, the coach partners with coachees in a collaborative process that helps them gain clarity, make intentional choices, and create meaningful change.

In this i2Insights contribution, we focus on the three core principles of Co-Active Coaching—fulfillment, balance, and process—and show how they can be used in teamwork.

Fulfillment: reconnecting people to their purpose

Fulfillment coaching is about connecting work to meaning. It can be particularly useful when team members are disengaged, anxious, or questioning the value of their work.

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How could research ethics governance better support participatory, transdisciplinary, and transformation-oriented research?

By Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang and Julia Wittmayer.

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1. Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang (biography)
2. Julia Wittmayer (biography)

How can we design an ethics governance system that can better respond when ethical dilemmas emerge after institutional approval has been granted? 

This question is increasingly pressing for researchers engaged in participatory, transdisciplinary, and transformative work. Ethical concerns often arise in-situ where partnerships evolve, power dynamics shift, community expectations change, and research begins to have effects beyond the original project design.

These concerns do not fit neatly into conventional ethics review procedures at universities, which still tend to be organised around upfront review: researchers submit an application, a committee assesses it, and approval is granted before the research begins. This model matters for safeguarding participants, researchers, and institutions.

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Leading with Lived Experience across the research life cycle

By Catherine Brasier, Dan Chamberlain and Sarah Wilson.

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1. Catherine Brasier (biography)
2. Dan Chamberlain (biography)
3. Sarah Wilson (biography)

How can researchers and people with Lived Experience expertise effectively and authentically work together in Lived-Experience-centred research?

Along with colleagues, we have developed a structured approach, namely the “Wellways Six Steps of the Research Life Cycle,” which is shown in the figure below and described, along with 16 key actions. The aim is to help researchers and people with Lived Experience expertise to “work it out together.”

People with Lived Experience expertise demonstrate deep understanding of the following elements to drive their input:

  1. their own personal experience of the issue at hand
  2. their understanding of other people’s Lived Experiences
  3. Lived Experience values and practices
  4. the history of the Lived Experience movement – including the impact of the systemic and social factors.

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Accountability in two different teamwork environments: The jigsaw puzzle and the collage

By Allison Dalton, Yvonne Pelling and Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano.

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1. Allison Dalton (biography)
2. Yvonne Pelling (biography)
3. Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano (biography)

How can teams demonstrate accountability in two different collaborative environments?

Accountability refers to the ways, both tangible and intangible, of showing up for ourselves and the rest of the team throughout a collaborative project. It gives rise to trust and forward momentum which impacts team functioning and ultimately the outcome of the work.

Here we look at accountability in two different collaborative environments, which we refer to using the metaphors of the jigsaw puzzle and the collage.

A team tasked with assembling a jigsaw puzzle deals with a finite set of clearly distinguished pieces, each to be fitted together in one correct way, and a reference image to demonstrate what the outcome will look like. Jigsaw puzzle teams work in unchanging environments with clearly measurable success criteria.

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Transdisciplinary research in the Global South: Challenges and recommendations

By Laila Sandroni and Marcel Bursztyn.

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1. Laila Sandroni (biography)
2. Marcel Bursztyn (biography)

What are the key challenges in conducting research that aims to bridge science, policy and grassroots demands? How can such challenges be addressed?

This i2Insights contribution is based on transdisciplinary research that we and colleagues undertook with local communities in Brazil (Sandroni et al., 2026) and we suggest that the challenges and recommendations have broader relevance. Some are relevant to all transdisciplinary research, while others have particular resonance in Global South contexts.

Challenges

Key challenges centre around timing; tensions in worldviews; urgency and impact of climate change; process-oriented research and academic outputs; and language, concepts, and translation.

Timing

The differing rhythms of academia, public policy, and local actors can be challenging.

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Implementation strategies: Functions and intentions

By Julia E. Moore and Sobia Khan.

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1. Julia E Moore (biography)
2. Sobia Khan (biography)

When planning for change, how can you usefully think about the intended function or purpose of your implementation strategy? And what are effective ways to usefully think about how the strategy will operate in practice, the mechanisms that shape how people experience it, and how change is activated? 

We have developed thirteen intended functions or purposes that an implementation strategy can serve. Functions clarify what a strategy is meant to accomplish. In addition, we have developed 35 intentions of implementation strategies, which describe how people engage with a strategy and how it leads to change.

Functions of implementation strategies

Individuals and teams who are planning, implementing, or supporting change may find it useful to review the 13 functions or purposes of strategies for change that are described in the table below in order to clearly communicate, and effectively plan for, what they are aiming to achieve.

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Three dimensions of context

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Gabriele Bammer (biography)

By Gabriele Bammer.

In research tackling complex societal and environmental problems, what is involved in taking context into account when aiming for more comprehensive understanding of a problem, as well as research support for policy and practice change so that the problem is better dealt with?

As outlined in my work developing Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S), considering context involves dealing with circumstances at three levels:

  • social or big picture, eg., the historical, political, economic, cultural, geographical and other circumstances
  • organizational, especially the structure and culture of the research and stakeholder organisations involved
  • individual, especially the positionality or identity of researchers and stakeholders.

Each of these dimensions of context has widespread ramifications, affecting:

  • how a problem manifests and is understood, including what is studied and how, as well as the unknowns considered to be pertinent
  • what actions are likely to be considered and to have a chance of being successful.

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Four lessons for pursuing participatory action-oriented PhD research inside the university system

By Raymond Hyma and Javier García Martínez.

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1. Raymond Hyma (biography)
2. Javier García Martínez (biography)

What happens when participatory, relational, and action-oriented inquiry meets the institutional architecture of the PhD: tight timelines, individual authorship, and demands for methodological certainty? What does it mean to pursue participatory and action oriented research as a PhD project inside the university system?

We are PhD candidates in a university alliance connecting Australia and the UK, navigating participatory and action-oriented commitments across two institutional contexts. We noticed that much of the literature about participatory doctorates is written retrospectively, once the thesis is submitted and the mess has been tidied into a coherent story. Our contribution is different: we write from the middle, while decisions are still being negotiated, while constraints are still shaping the work, while we are still learning how to stay accountable to participatory values in real time.

So, what are we learning so far?

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Navigating polarities: Fostering both/and mindsets in team science

By Gemma Jiang and Joanna Kaniewska.

authors_gemma-jiang_joanna-kaniewska
1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Joanna Kaniewska (biography)

How can teams develop a mindset that makes differences productive, such as disciplinary differences in work processes, communication styles, underlying assumptions, behavioral norms, and more? In particular, how can teams move from an either/or mindset, which often leads to defensiveness driven by the need to prove that “I am right; you are wrong” to a both/and mindset, which fosters a learning culture in which differences become sources of generative tension that can propel creativity and collective insight?

One practical way to cultivate a both/and mindset is through working with polarities which are opposing yet interdependent tendencies. By integrating both tendencies, teams can move beyond either/or thinking and draw on a wider range of perspectives. We argue that developing the capacity to navigate polarities helps teams navigate differences more effectively overall.

In this i2Insights contribution, we describe three limiting beliefs drawn from our experience with team science coaching and show how they can be transformed through polarity thinking.

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Building trust in researching about and engaging with underserved communities

By Katrina Messiha.

katrina-messiha
Katrina Messiha (biography)

How can we ensure that the many people whose lives are shaped by homelessness, migration, poverty, trauma, mental illness, caring responsibilities, social isolation and other contributors to marginalisation are adequately represented and well engaged with in relevant research?

This is important because if some lives are missing from the evidence base, they may also be missing from the services, policies and practices built upon it. But what happens when researchers try to engage people whose previous encounters with healthcare, welfare, housing, immigration or other public systems, including research, may have been difficult, exhausting or even harmful?

The usual language used to describe such people is “hard to reach,” “seldom heard” or “difficult to engage.” These phrases may be commonly used and well intended, but they can hide a pressing question: Where does trust already exist and how can research begin there?

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