Integration and Implementation Insights
A community blog and repository of resources for improving research impact on complex real-world problems
By Aysha Fleming
What’s required for researchers to effectively engage with local communities in international research tackling complex socio-ecological problems?
In a project involving Indonesian and Australian researchers working with local communities to restore peatlands in Indonesia, we identified three key elements for international collaboration with stakeholders:
Project design
By Eric Schearer and Gemma Jiang
How can newly forming cross-disciplinary teams develop effective strategies for working together?
We provide lessons from our experience preparing a cross-disciplinary research proposal for which we leant heavily on the mutual learning mindsets and norms which are the central elements for the Team Effectiveness Model for Science (Schwarz and Bennett, 2021). The principal investigator (Schearer) enlisted the help of a leadership consultant (Jiang).
Mutual learning mindsets and norms
As shown in the figure below, mutual learning comprises a mindset, composed of core values and assumptions, plus specific behaviors derived from the mindset that, together, are essential for effective working relationships.
By Catherine Durose, Beth Perry, Liz Richardson and Rikki Dean
What are the hidden politics of seeking to co-produce research with stakeholders? What kinds of leadership are common in co-produced research? What trade-offs does each kind of leadership make in addressing issues such as being directive, inclusive, innovative, accountable, open to what emerges and sharing power?
The hidden politics of co-production in research
The hidden politics of co-production in research involves tensions and debates about:
1. The purposes of scientific work.
Co-production brings together people, not only with different expertise, but also with different purposes for being involved, which can range from achieving more effective policy and practice outcomes to delivering social justice and empowering those experiencing disadvantage.
By Gemma Jiang and Robert Hacku
What does it take for graduate students to become good at facilitation? What skills do they need to learn and how can such skills best be imparted?
A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. In cross-disciplinary research, thoughtful facilitation is necessary to enable effective interaction across disciplines and sectors.
We describe an apprentice facilitator program developed in a cross-disciplinary research team comprised of nine faculty and 15 graduate students from four academic institutes, representing six disciplines.
Five apprentices were selected from the graduate students on the team. The program was one semester long and took on average one hour per week.
By Kitty Wooley
What does it take to motivate competent professionals to show up for mission-focused conversation on their own time? What is the result? How can interaction, knowledge exchange, and knowledge transfer be achieved when some participants are meeting for the first time – especially if they’re coming from different kinds of organizations and hierarchical levels?
In this blog post, I describe the experience of Senior Fellows and Friends, a group meeting for conversational events that has kept its momentum for 17 years, over 91 meetings, and become an organic engine of opportunity for new and midcareer leaders.
By Giedre Kligyte, Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer, Jarnae Leslie, Tyler Key, Bethany Hooper and Eleanor Salazar
How can universities leverage students’ perspectives to create pathways towards lasting organisational change in higher education? How can we conceptualise institutional impact and outcomes of transdisciplinary student-staff partnerships?
Why student-staff partnerships?
By Chris Cvitanovic and Rebecca Shellock
How important is trust at the science-policy interface? How can you build trust when working with decision-makers? And how can trust be repaired after a break-down?
How important is trust when working at the science-policy interface?
Trust is important at 3 levels:
By Niki Ellis, Anne-Maree Dowd, Tamika Heiden and Gabriele Bammer
What does it take for research to be impactful? How should research impact be assessed? How much responsibility for impact should rest with researchers and how much with government, business and/or community partners?
We present five key insights based on our experience in achieving research impact in Australia:
By Adriana Moreno Cely, Darío Cuajera Nahui, César Gabriel Escobar Vásquez, Tom Vanwing and Nelson Tapia Ponce
A Spanish version of this post is available.
How can marginalised knowledge systems really make themselves heard in collaborative research? What’s needed for research decolonisation to properly recognise Indigenous and local knowledge? How can power imbalances be bridged to ensure that everyone has an equal voice?
We describe the “circle of dialogue wisdom” as a methodological framework to reconceptualise participation, empowerment and collaboration. The framework has 6 phases, which should be seen as spiral and iterative rather than linear.
The six phases, shown in the figure below are:
By Basirat Oyalowo
Why is transdisciplinary research important for the advancement of African countries? What are the key issues that need to be taken into account in fostering such research?
This blog post presents key lessons from the ‘Transdisciplinary Research Workshop: Rethinking Research in COVID-19 times’, held in August 2020, in which we brought together academia, government, civil society, industry and development agencies to delve into how researchers might navigate the new terrain wrought by COVID-19 in Africa and use it to further the development of transdisciplinary research. Although the focus of the workshop was urbanization and habitable cities and on adjusting to COVID-19, the lessons for enhancing transdisciplinary research are more broadly generalizable.
By Irina Dallo, Jan Freihardt and Juanita von Rothkirch
What is an effective way of providing students with practical experience in stakeholder engagement? How can students learn to communicate and engage with community members on a transdisciplinary project, as well as how to create a space for those community members to reflect on their daily lives through interactions and discussions with the student outsiders? What makes it possible for students to broaden their horizons and to acquire new competences and skills?
We present our reflections on how the Winter School 2020 “Science meets Practice” run by ETH Zürich successfully contributed to our transdisciplinary learning process. We suggest there are six key lessons for those who want to design a successful course.
By Kat Smith and Paul Cairney
How can we improve the way we think about the relationship between evidence and policy? What are the key insights that existing research provides?
1. Evidence does not tell us what to do
It helps reduce uncertainty, but does not tell us how we should interpret problems or what to do about them.
2. There is no such thing as ‘the evidence’
Instead, there is a large number of researchers with different backgrounds, making different assumptions, asking different questions, using different methods, and addressing different problems.