Drawing on a recent study of systemic challenges to delivering research funding for societal change and evidence from a recent meeting of research funders, Andreas Kjær Stage, Carter Walter Bloch, Duncan Andrew Thomas, Maria-Theresa Norn and Irene Ramo…
Category: research design
How to make Theories of Change deliver societal impact
Theories of Change have become a popular mechanism for research funders to build impact into the design phase of research projects. Laurens Hessels, Fedes van Rijn, Stefan de Jong, Wendy Reijmerink, Jeroen van Houwelingen, Allison McIntosh, Gerald Jan …
Why does impact still feel like an add-on to research designs?
Reflecting on his role as an academic and member of a research funding organisation, Duncan Green, considers how impact has in some ways still not become embedded in research culture and is often treated a bureaucratic hurdle to overcome. Because I hav…
Shorter timeframes, co-designed, with “first-cut” insights: how university policy research can become more responsive to the needs of policymakers
How might universities develop a research agenda that is responsive to the needs of policymakers? After running a series of workshops on public policy innovation with policy practitioners from various levels of government in Australia, Tamas Wells and Emma Blomkamp identified three ways in which policy research might become more “user-centred”: more variety in the timeframes of research projects, with […]
Five lessons for researchers who want to collaborate with governments and development organisations but avoid the common pitfalls
The appeal of collaborating with a government agency, or an organisation funded by one, seems obvious. It provides researchers with much needed resources and information, while also offering practitioners and policymakers a way of generating the evidence needed to design better programmes. In practice, however, it’s not always easy to make collaborative research work well. Susan Dodsworth and Nic Cheeseman […]