CONTEXT AND POSITIONALITY

Our discussion is guided by our experiences as United Kingdom-based political scientists conducting multiple international non-governmental organization (INGO)–commissioned research projects on conflict and resilience in Central Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East. Specifically, we draw from an ongoing European Union (EU)–funded research consultancy with an INGO, assessing the integration of its humanitarian programs to strengthen community resilience to violence (otherwise known as conflict sensitivity). We use the case studies of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and South Sudan. Our collaboration with practitioners in the fieldwork crosses three main levels: NGO national office staff in each country; local partner organizations that administer the NGO’s programs in each country; and local communities in each country that are the beneficiaries of (and participants in) the NGO’s projects. Our collaboration with NGO staff is primarily in formulating the research questions and research design; with local partners in piloting the methodology; with local partners and community members in data collection; and with NGO staff and local partners in dissemination.

We are aware of the issues of power and positionality between ourselves and our collaborators, as well as disparities among and between our local partners. Because we are both white-presenting, US/European-educated researchers working on these projects as consultants of a major international NGO, we are mindful of our privilege and the perception that some partners may have of us in these collaborations. Thus, although we strive for equitable relationships, we are aware of the inherent asymmetries in all research—especially in NGO-commissioned research in which we are seen not only as scholars but also as representatives of a donor. This positionality intrinsically links researchers to the development institutions and marks them as potential funding agents, thereby endangering the opportunity to create meaningful partnerships.

The creation of partnerships is not problem free and may create or reinforce local asymmetries in communities where we work. For example, although we work with practitioners at multiple levels (i.e., local, national, regional, and international), it is clear that partners at the national NGO level have a certain degree of power relative to the local organizations with whom they partner; those partners, in turn, have a degree of power in the communities they serve. All researchers should keep this positionality in mind, especially when relying on local interlocutors to act as gatekeepers to communities. It is especially pronounced in NGO-commissioned projects in which researchers are more reliant on the funding organization’s networks.

BRIDGING SCHOLAR–PRACTITIONER DIVIDES VIA COLLABORATIVE METHODOLOGIES

Commissioned research often asks political scientists to provide narrow, project-based findings. As a result, researchers may be epistemologically split between focusing on a problem-solving approach, which prioritizes pragmatic, program-focused recommendations, and a scholarly approach, which is oriented around theoretical and conceptual contributions. In other words, a key challenge of commissioned research is that NGOs often seek research to assess a particular aspect of a program or project. This makes it challenging to construct a research design that fulfils the client’s requirements (and, it is hoped, improves the program) while informing knowledge beyond the narrow confines of the immediate project. Compounding this, NGOs use metrics by which they measure their work using language that is based on internal organizational priorities and sector jargon. This makes it challenging to translate academic understandings of issues to meet the needs of the NGO and vice versa.

In our work, we have found that collaborative methodologies with community partners can ameliorate some of these scholar–practitioner divides. First, in terms of research design, we work closely with local practitioners at multiple levels to gain an understanding of the issues facing their communities. Via informal interviews and small-group conversations, we listen as local partners outline their experience of working in the community and what they believe are the key challenges. Aware that the particular positionality of partners in communities will impact what they deem valuable to tell us, we then paint a larger picture by triangulating findings with knowledge from focus-group discussions, interviews, and community mapping with community members. These conversations with local partners and beneficiaries allow us to then work with NGO staff to refine research questions and mutually decide on appropriate methodologies, which we pilot together. This collaborative process helps to bridge the gap between researchers and partners by ensuring that both the research questions and the methodologies are useful and applicable to all participants. Furthermore, it enhances the rigor of our research by allowing us to develop our research questions more fully and to include more multilevel analysis in our research design.

Second, we work in collaboration with practitioners to ameliorate the linguistic and conceptual challenges; commonly understood terms in the NGO sector do not always translate smoothly in communities or in academia. For example, we charted the different interpretations of the word “conflict” from the EU donor to the international office of the NGO, to the regional offices, and to the local partners who interpreted it at the grassroots level. Through this process, “conflict” was translated multiple times, with understanding varying among the international, regional, and local levels. This variance had a significant impact on the implementation of the project, sometimes resulting in friction between international and grassroots actors. Placing participants at the fulcrum of the research and methodology allowed us to emphasize their perceptions in the study and to use their context-specific definitions that originally were conceptualized in more abstract terms by the NGOs. This process helped us to develop generalizable terms that extended across different cases and amplified local understanding that extended beyond the parameters of the original NGO program design. As Asiamah, Awal, and MacLean (Reference Asiamah, Awal and MacLean2021) discuss in this symposium, working collaboratively can strengthen conceptualization both within and between projects.

Third, we work in collaboration with practitioners in disseminating our research findings. One problem that we have observed between researchers and practitioners is that the final reports that clients have commissioned do not always help to advance local partners’ understanding of the issues that affect them. The primary reason for this is that dissemination of findings normally takes place far from the conflict context, in the safety of universities or NGO offices, and follow-up activities usually are not conducted within field sites to transfer knowledge more widely. We avoid this problem by sharing early drafts of reports with local partners to elicit feedback and facilitate discussion, ensuring that our findings are seen by the partners and that we can discuss further details with them directly. An example of good practice was when the commissioning NGO on our project invited the relevant local staff to one of the European offices to participate in a workshop with us to discuss the lessons learned from our research and possible methods to implement recommendations. In addition, we collaborated with the commissioner of the research through national and head offices to identify not only international but also local and regional areas of dissemination. Furthermore, the collaborative approach has fostered our “do-no-harm” approach in dissemination, wherein we communicate directly with our partners before sharing findings to ensure that the safety of colleagues and beneficiaries is not compromised.

ENHANCING EQUITABLE AND ETHICAL PRACTICE VIA COLLABORATIVE METHODOLOGIES

Collaborative methods not only help bridge scholar–practitioner divides; they also power asymmetries and “Global North/South” lines, as discussed by Bleck, Dendere, and Sangaré (Reference Bleck, Dendere and Sangaré2018) and Michelitch (Reference Michelitch2018). In our research, we try to avoid the North/South dichotomy and instead focus on deconstructing elitist approaches to research that fail to consider the agency of people in communities being studied. This is especially crucial when conducting commissioned research in the humanitarian sector, where aid and development often are criticized as being neocolonialist by reinforcing structures of power and dependency.

We find that collaborative methodologies, although not eradicating power asymmetries, can reduce the disparity of power between commissioning agents and grassroots actors. A clear problem for researchers in commissioned projects is the palpable fear among local partners that if they critique programs being implemented by the contracting NGO, funding will be discontinued. As a result, local partners try during field visits by the NGOs and researchers to put “the best foot forward,” highlighting successes and glossing over issues they might have encountered. As explained in the next section, because of the fragile and conflict dynamic of the places in which we work, we faced and overcame implicit pressure to put a more positive spin on final reports so as to better reflect our partners.

Collaborative methods reduce power asymmetries by contextualizing the positionality of the researchers in the eyes of collaborators, not as agents of the funders but rather as colleagues who can help them address their problems. To do this, we spend significant informal time with local partners and engage with them during our research-design phase, ensuring that we integrate their insights into the design and reassuring them that their perspective is valued and crucial to our research. In this way, local partners move beyond being study participants and become stakeholders—a relationship that is further developed by recruiting them to comment on report drafts. By establishing direct relationships that are not managed by the commissioning NGO, local partners are able to speak freely on issues about programming. The result is that the research can comment on potentially harmful dynamics of development programming without imperiling the local partners’ position with the funding agent. This is a small but meaningful step in reducing power asymmetry between NGOs and grassroots partners, and it places local insight at the center of reports, filtering this knowledge directly back to the donor community.

CHALLENGES AND BEST PRACTICES

Although our experience with collaborative methodologies has been positive overall, it is not without challenges. As Cyr (Reference Cyr2021) discusses in this symposium, there are potential pitfalls in trying to do too much when blending voices, especially when using mixed methods, as we often do in our research. Furthermore, as Gellman (Reference Gellman2021) points out in her article, collaborative methodologies also bring logistical challenges and often are more time- and labor-intensive than a more traditional approach.

In commissioned research—and specifically in the humanitarian sector in which we work—the primary challenge in collaborative research with practitioners is maintaining neutrality. We agree with Kaplan (Reference Kaplan2021), who argues in this symposium that the partial independence of analysis can enhance the credibility as well as the activist power of findings. We have found this to be true in our work, and we maintain some independence in our data analysis by doing our own coding of interviews and focus groups and drawing preliminary conclusions before sharing and discussing them with collaborating practitioners. As described previously, our research often is intertwined with aid and development programs; therefore, the fact that our collaborators often are practitioners or beneficiaries within those programs makes it necessary to maintain independence in this part of the research process.

The question of neutrality raises other issues in commissioned research. Because we work in “fragile contexts”—places in which violent conflict intersects with humanitarian needs—we are mindful that our findings likely will inform NGO program design and donor investment in positive or negative ways with real-life consequences for communities living in dire contexts. Furthermore, although we are not evaluators, the simple fact that we do collaborate with NGO staff for much of the research process makes us initially anxious to communicate critical findings. By navigating these tensions through collaboration in all phases of the research project, we have not encountered disagreements about outputs. By inviting critical input from our partners, we manage expectations and ensure that their insights are integrated throughout the reports.

This continual collaboration created close relationships with national staff and local partners, allowing us to have more critical, self-reflexive conversations with them about what was and was not working—a level of depth that we would not have achieved through a singular extractive interview. These conversations revealed difficulties and frustrations within the NGO programs that were not always visible on the surface, and they encouraged us to ensure a critical eye that would aid local partners’ improvement of programs. Our local partners are deeply impacted by the dynamics that we were researching, and close collaboration with them may have impacted our ability to generate “objective” findings. Although we integrated their perspectives throughout, we had to ensure that evidence was rigorous and that we took as objective a view as possible. Presenting conclusions that integrate the voices of local partners with strong empirical evidence is more likely to convince commissioning NGOs to adopt changes in their programs that help communities.

The question about objectivity applies not only to our practitioner-focused outputs but also to our academic output and the challenge of bridging the scholar–practitioner gap in commissioned research. This tension has not only methodological but also ontological implications, especially for political scientists working from a critical-theory orientation. Critical theorists argue that problem-solving–based research (focused on pragmatic, policy-oriented findings) that is typical in commissioned research does not sufficiently consider underlying structural issues (Pugh Reference Pugh2004), whereas those who take the problem-solving approach argue that critical theories do not provide timely or workable solutions to immediate problems. This tension is present especially in the humanitarian-aid sector, in which critical theorists often view development organizations as perpetuating dependency—or even being unintentionally complicit in government agendas. This was the case in Myanmar, for example, where aid agencies’ support for Internally Displaced Persons camps essentially enabled the government’s forced removal and isolation policy concerning the Rohingya minority—even though withdrawing support essentially would have meant the end of those communities. We believe it is vital for researchers to deliver on commissioned research to NGO clients that, in the problem-solving tradition, addresses real-world problems while also being able to analyze the broader structural issues undergirding the sectors or contexts in which they work. This is a fine balance to strike; however, by deliberately addressing this tension, researchers can ensure that the work they produce on commissioned projects will make meaningful scholarly contributions (i.e., the data collected will potentially contribute to peer review) while also providing useful recommendations to a client.