Across the landscaping work, our exploration of models of practice, and our collaborative design processes, some recurrent pathways to implement the Centres for Exchange concept have appeared. These strategies encompass possible areas of practice to bring the principles and vision of the Centres for Exchange concept to life, both through the actions of place-based knowledge collectives and the collaborative work of the broader learning network. We have clustered these strategies and their potential related activities under three main strategic domains:
Research and
learning
This set of strategies explores the role of knowledge collectives in transforming research – from design through implementation to knowledge sharing.
Organisational
transformation
These strategies are focused on how knowledge collectives might work to shift the more proximate enabling environment that shapes research practice in context.
Knowledge exchange
and influencing
This strategic domain focuses on the strategies and activities that work to transform the wider research ecosystem.
This strategy is focused on fostering encounters that enable researchers to gain richer understandings of the contexts where research is conducted to create the conditions for more mutually beneficial research. It will enable diverse stakeholders, including those not traditionally positioned as researchers, to co-create research agendas, set priorities, and produce new forms of knowledge that respond to their own needs and priorities.
A) Convene participatory processes to solicit input on local, national, or regional research priorities, ensuring that research agendas are set jointly with diverse stakeholders – including those who represent the many communities that exist in the place(s) where research is taking place – and that they speak to the issues that matter most in different local contexts.
B) Facilitate exploratory and inception phases in research projects that focus on understanding contextual dynamics more deeply and building relationships that enable more deliberative decision-making before research is designed and implemented.
C) Explore new approaches to co-creating or strengthening community-led review boards.
D) Support participatory protocol development processes that ensure protocols are co-developed and refined with input from diverse research stakeholders.
E) Provide support and training for community organisations and collectives to design research projects that respond to their priorities and needs.
F) Facilitate connections between communities with emergent research questions and researchers with the training/skills/resources/facilities to help them answer them.
G) Focus on strengthening relationships across disciplines and sectors through stakeholder mapping and network building, engaging key power brokers and decision-makers early in the research process, involving them as co-producers and co-owners of knowledge from the start.
This strategy is focused on the role of Centres for Exchange in supporting the development of engaged and inclusive research approaches and methods. A key focus of this strategy is to foster intersectoral collaboration with non-research actors including local social movements, health service providers, NGOs, and government actors that can help to ensure research is relevant, actionable, and impactful.
A) Facilitate cross-project “participatory methods labs,” where researchers can collaborate, reflect on the possibilities and challenges of different methodological approaches in practice, and adapt methods to a diversity of contexts – documenting their process learning to inform practice.
B) Foster collaborations between researchers and non-research actors such as local social movements, local health service providers, NGOs, and government entities that enable locally-led, intersectoral research projects.
C) Promote and facilitate research collaborations that bring together projects/people working on different intersecting issues, or on the same issues but from different angles, to learn from each other and co-design new collaborative projects.
D) Ensure that diverse community members are engaged both as knowledge producers and key experts and as knowledge users by inviting them into the research process and supporting them to take ownership of key findings that matter to them.
This strategy is centred on the development of practice-driven and responsive approaches to support and train diverse members of knowledge communities, including researchers, practitioners, and representatives of communities in their diversity.
A) Provide focused and accessible training and capacity-strengthening for members of knowledge communities in how to foster equitable, ethical, and caring research relationships.
B) Support researchers to critically interrogate and transform their own research practices to ensure they are more collaborative, ethical, and responsive to communities’ needs and priorities.
C) Provide training and support to diverse members of knowledge communities in equitable and inclusive knowledge management and knowledge translation, including effective strategies for the feedback of research findings.
D) Advise and train power brokers in research (funders, universities, publishers, etc) to develop systems and structures that enable collaborative, community-led research.
This strategy is centred on (1) fostering ongoing process learning at the knowledge collective level, and (2) ensuring that knowledge produced within the knowledge collectives is shared openly, accessibly, and inclusively with diverse local and regional stakeholders to enable its greatest impact.
A) Support collectives’ stakeholders to develop process learning tools and foster approaches to knowledge exchange that allow for adaptive learning and collaborative design throughout the knowledge cycle.
B) Develop approaches to strategic knowledge translation for optimal sharing with different audiences/partners
C) Foster trust through an ethic of co-learning, openness, and honesty, even when it comes to sharing issues and ‘failures.’
This strategy is centred on governance and operational practices that work to realise principles of equity, inclusion and care within research organisations and knowledge collectives, explicitly aiming to redress historically shaped structures of inequality within knowledge communities and between them.
A) Implement transformative governance and operational models, including those emerging from anti-racist, anticolonial, and feminist principles.
B) Hold regular convenings to refocus the gaze of the knowledge collectives on their core values and commitments
C) Foster inclusive and equitable partnerships and collaborations with diverse actors in the place-based knowledge communities where collectives are located
D) Ensure that the voices involved in the governance and operations of research organisations and knowledge collectives are representative of the diverse populations and communities involved, while working explicitly to privilege voices that have been historically underrepresented and undervalued.
E) Develop new approaches to institutionalising an ethics of care in daily operations.
This strategy focuses on co-designing participatory learning and impact assessment tools and systems that provide reliable evidence on the health impacts of research while also reflecting the complexities of local realities and experiences.
A) Implement transformative governance and operational models, including those emerging from anti-racist, anticolonial, and feminist principles.
B) Develop and test participatory, inclusive, and context-specific approaches to collecting impact data.
C) Design and use change metrics, indicators, and tools that more effectively capture the complexities of local experiences and realities.
D) Share impact assessment results with beneficiaries through regular feedback loops and hold participatory processes using results to shape upcoming project parameters.
This strategy is centred on fostering knowledge exchange across diverse knowledge collectives at regional and global levels to ensure that knowledge is shared with diverse actors, and that it is accessible, inclusive, and impactful. This strategy also focuses on providing a route to support strategic decision-making and accountability for funders and other power brokers in (health) research. Rather than relying on project-by-project approaches to learning from affected contexts and communities, activities under this strategy would enable funders and power brokers in the research ecosystem and other partners to gain real-time learning and ‘ground level’ insights in strategically relevant contexts to inform their strategies and influence the broader research and development ecosystem.
A) Host knowledge collectives and research institutions for thematic co-learning/feedback of findings events on a rotational basis.
B) Create productive spaces for ongoing engagement and dialogue between diverse members of knowledge communities, including those involved as research participants or intended beneficiaries, researchers, diverse service providers, policy makers, and other power brokers.
C) Build or contribute to communities of practice in order to learn with and from other program implementers, researchers, and stakeholders.
D) Develop knowledge translation modalities that effectively deliver contextualised insights and ’lived experience’ forms of knowledge in ways that foster deeper understanding for diverse stakeholders.
E) Ensure that context-specific research and learning is consolidated and shared through different modalities that allow for open discussion and productive knowledge exchange between diverse stakeholders in the research ecosystem, including the development of public repositories for sharing knowledge and learning.
F) Create advisory processes and structures that support/enable participatory priority setting and funding processes for funders and other power brokers.
This strategy is focused on the role of knowledge collectives as thought leaders and alliance builders, collaborating with others, especially across the global South, to transform the research ecosystem through policy advising, advocacy, and guideline setting.
A) Explore and pilot new approaches to incentivise and institutionalise equitable, collaborative research and knowledge exchange with the broader research ecosystem.
B) Act as a bridge to ensure the social value of health research is maximised by working towards more effective integration of health research with health systems strengthening and the translation of research outputs into actionable policies.
C) Foster the co-creation of new guidelines for equitable research collaboration, potentially including guidelines related to research ethics, data ownership/management, authorship, and publishing – and develop tools that support their implementation.
D) Promote and foster learning regarding participatory approaches to research funding.