On Thursday I was in Bristol for the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement’s ‘Engage’ Conference. The theme of the conference was ‘Exploring Collaboration’ and delegates included representatives of community organisations, universities, charities, policy makers and funders from all around the world. Professor Eleonora Belfiore from Loughborough University and I led a workshop on ‘Collaboration and policy-sensitive research’, drawing on our experience of the AHRC Understanding Everyday Participation research project. We discussed the challenges of trying to effect policy change through collaborative research. I highlighted three risks: that the community partners just want the research to justify what they already think they know; that the academic research partners end up merely presenting back to the community partners the information they provided; and that, even if the research goes well, the final glossy report and its recommendations lie forgotten in a drawer a few months later without having achieved any policy change. We had a lively and thoughtful debate with our workshop participants which surfaced many examples of both good and bad practice in relation to policy-sensitive research.
Robin Simpson.
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Cultural Playing Field 