Alexis Dewaele
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘A grounded theory on collaborative interactions in a community-university partnership: the case of youth in the public space’.
In a society that is steered by complex processes such as globalisation and institutional complexity, we are increasingly confronted with what is sometimes called ‘wicked problems’ (i.e., a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise). At Ghent University in Belgium, we were interested in trying to solve such problems by setting up a collaboration with diverse community stakeholders. We sent out a call to diverse stakeholders asking them to submit proposals on societal challenges that could be addressed by bringing together various actors and making use of scientific knowledge. An employee of the municipal department of well-being and equal opportunities submitted a case related to antisocial behavior by youth at a municipal park. The researchers involved selected the case as a pilot project to further investigate collaborative processes. For our study published in Evidence & Policy, we analysed a set of four video recorded co-creation sessions of this particular case to learn to better understand the process of how knowledge exchange can actually contribute to problem solving.
Although our findings relate to a specific case study, they confirm previous studies that showed the importance of three dimensions that can enable as well as hinder collaboration with diverse stakeholders. The first dimension refers to the role of organisational asymmetries: The fact that stakeholders bring in different kinds of expertise, speak different languages, and have different political agenda’s. Second, people are driven by incentives that often align with the organisations to which they belong (e.g. academics who pursue peer-reviewed publications). Finally, in a collaboration, brokers (i.e. individuals who engage in multiple functions including research dissemination, facilitating relationships, and capacity building) may play a fundamental role. Effective brokers can succeed in bringing stakeholders into a new dimension where distortion and conflict is allowed. At the same time, these brokers should facilitate creativity and mutual understanding which then gradually leads to knowledge diffusion and to solving complex challenges.
What became clear from our sessions with involved stakeholders (i.e., city employees, representatives from the local police department, the prosecutor’s office and a youth organisation active at the park) while discussing youth engagement in criminal activity or vandalism, was that the different roles and mandates of individual stakeholder representatives determined their access to sometimes confidential information (regarding specific youth). The lack of getting feedback from other stakeholders led to frustrations about being left in the dark about specific incidents that happened. However, through building up trust with each other, the difficulty of how to communicate about confidential issues was partly solved by sharing information ‘between the lines’ (i.e., on an informal level). Besides having an impact on the sharing of confidential information, different roles also led to different relationships with the youth themselves. People working at the youth organisation naturally developed close ties with youth since their main aim was to provide them a safe shelter. This was of course quite different for those working at the prosecutor’s office who were mainly involved in assessing whether an individual was ‘guilty’ or not.
Finally, achieving positive outcomes through collaboration was perceived by stakeholders as slowly evolving towards small successes (not fully chipping away at the wicked problem), and was facilitated by being able to accept failure, working in a climate of trust, developing a shared identity, managing expectations and being able to connect with youth. To enable achieving positive results, boundary organisations and boundary objects may play an important role. The former refers to organisations (in our case the university) that involve the participation of actors from diverse stakeholder groups and are staffed by professionals who serve a mediating role. They might help to overcome divergences between stakeholders. Next, boundary objects are objects that facilitate communication across disciplinary borders by creating shared vocabulary. In our case, working on a brochure with flow charts (that explained how each stakeholder’s organisation worked) became such an ‘object’. Rather than the actual brochure itself as an outcome, the process to make the brochure was more important as it functioned as a task on which the collaboration and a shared identity was based. To conclude, collaborative interactions are an iterative rather than a linear process and accepting set-backs is part of that. However, effective brokering, building trust and managing expectations prove to be crucial ingredients in achieving positive results.
Alexis Dewaele teaches qualitative research methods at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Ghent University. He is also the coordinator of an interdisciplinary consortium called ‘Working Together for Mental Health’. His research interests are focused on the study of mental and sexual health, research methods and evidence-based policy and practice. https://www.ugent.be/psync/en. Twitter: @PSYNC_UGENT. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexis-dewaele-196a6a2/
Image credit: Photo by Maksim Chernishev on Unsplash
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Dewaele, A. Anderson, L. Klima, N. and Lauwerier, E. (2022). A grounded theory on collaborative interactions in a community-university partnership: the case of youth in the public space. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/174426421X16599727516506.
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested in reading:
Academic knowledge brokering in local policy spaces: negotiating and implementing dynamic idea types
Building consensus in research partnerships: a scoping review of consensus methods
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