Set the agenda together
to ensure relevance and shared ownership.
- Identify and involve stakeholders and project partners from the outset.
- Define the common goal and research approach jointly.
- Clarify and manage different objectives and expectations.
Jointly setting the agenda is a key step to achieving broad ownership and relevance. A joint agenda – and working towards a common goal – helps to ensure high individual motivation and engagement among actors. Before embarking on a collaborative research or teaching endeavour, partners should explicitly consider the unique value the project aims to bring to all involved parties, the study region, and its population. And they should ask: What forms of collaboration – simple or complex; local or global; disciplinary, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary; and/or interinstitutional – are best suited to achieve the project’s objectives? Depending on the expected added value and the form of collaboration, the challenges and complexity of applying the six principles can vary significantly.
Research projects funded by the Global North and carried out in the Global South often face ethical challenges, lack relevance, and are likely to fail in application or scaling if they don’t actively or sufficiently involve the on-site academic community, practitioners, or experts. To address ethical principles and create impact, a project must include the relevant stakeholders right from the start – ideally, at the proposal-writing or pre-project stages. Early inclusion of all stakeholders – including non-academic experts and underrepresented communities – ensures that the project can integrate complementary priorities, expertise, and perspectives. Early inclusion allows the relevant partners to jointly set the agenda, discuss implementation, and develop shared ownership.
Setting a research agenda involves thinking through each stage of the research process. Specifically, identifying and involving relevant stakeholders, strategic partners, and research partners at the outset, and then jointly developing the project: identifying and framing the overall purpose of the research and formulating the research questions; analysing risks and opportunities; planning the research design, approach, and data collection methodology; planning the analysis and interpretation of data; developing the monitoring, evaluation, and learning scheme of the research and collaborative process; and planning the dissemination, application, and implementation of results.
Begin by anticipating the outcomes and associated outputs needed to achieve the common goal, which will allow you to plan focused research activities. It is often implicit that results must be innovative and of high academic quality while also demonstrating societal or environmental relevance and contributing to transformation. Moreover, it is expected that research partnerships contribute to capacity development. Consequently, the triangle of innovative research, capacity development, and societal relevance/impact can form the basic goal-orientation for partnership-based research. When planning and managing research partnerships, the tensions between these core goals must be taken into account. This can be done through one of the following strategies:
- Clearly prioritize one or two of these goals (e.g. combining research with capacity development).
- Maintain all three goals but clearly phase and/or subdivide the endeavour into components that specifically address each goal. This approach is particularly helpful for research partnerships that go beyond individual, short-term projects and encompass networks, programmes, long-term proactive alliances, communities, and cohorts.
In-depth:
