Alina Potts

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Engaging refugee women and girls as experts: co-creating evidence on sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian crises using creative, participatory methods’, part of the Special Issue on Creativity and Co-production.

Efforts to build evidence on how best to deliver humanitarian assistance have grown over the past decade, at a time when the number of forcibly displaced people in the world has risen to over 84 million. Yet crisis-affected people are often left out of shaping the questions asked, and participating in answering them. Creative, participatory research methods can break down these silos and enable the co-production of evidence with displaced populations, and its uptake for practice and policy. The ‘Empowered Aid‘ study engages in participatory action research with refugee women and girls in Uganda and Lebanon to examine how to better prevent sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in aid delivery. Co-producing knowledge about violence with those most affected by it creates actionable evidence to reduce risks.

In humanitarian settings, pre-existing power imbalances due to gender, age, and other factors can be exacerbated. While women and children account for a large share of the displaced, they are often left out of decision making, despite the impact aid delivery has on their lives and their heightened risk of gender-based violence, including sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA). While a system of reporting and response has been put in place over the last two decades, many survivors are discouraged from using it due to a lack of access, information, and trust in the process or the organisations leading it. Accountability mechanisms have also focused on responding to abuses already perpetrated, rather than working to prevent them.

Katey Thom, Stella Black, David Burnside and Jessica Hastings

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘He Ture Kia Tika/Let the Law Be Right: informing evidence-based policy through kaupapa Māori and co-production of lived experience’, part of the Special Issue on Creativity and Co-production.

A kaupapa Māori co-production project that honours the voices of those with lived experience of incarceration

Research often tells us most prisoners have experienced mental distress or addiction within their lifetime but often end up in the ‘too hard basket’. The criminal justice system of Aotearoa, with its strong Westminster roots, significantly contributes to intergenerational traumatic experiences and struggles to get help that is needed. Our project aimed to reject this basket, replacing it with a diverse array of kete (baskets) filled with localised mātauranga (ancient knowledge derived from a te ao Māori worldview), strategies and solutions to improve wellbeing and reduce reoffending.

Louise Phillips, Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø and Lisbeth Frølunde

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Arts-based co-production in participatory research: harnessing creativity in the tension between process and product’, part of the Special Issue on Creativity and Co-production.

In participatory research, researchers share the ideal of democratising knowledge production, on the basis of an expanded understanding of what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts. People with knowledge based on their own lived experience take part as co-researchers in processes of co-producing knowledge together with academic researchers. This process of harnessing the knowledge of people with lived experience can make a valuable contribution to the transformation of health and social care practice, as well as to the research field.

Arts-based research methods are often used to draw out the personal knowledge of co-researchers, including the emotional and aesthetic dimensions. But the use of arts-based co-production in participatory research does not easily get rid of the difficulties of putting the principles into practice – due to the tensions that arise between cultivating the collaborative, creative process and generating specific research results.

Mandy D. Owens, Sally Ngo, Sue Grinnell, Dana Pearlman, Betty Bekemeier and Sarah Cusworth

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Co-producing evidence-informed criminal legal re-entry policy with the community: an application of policy codesign’, part of the Special Issue on Creativity and Co-production.

Health service researchers are plagued by the fear that policy and system-level improvement efforts will ignore or under-utilize research. Consequently, efforts at system improvement that come out of research centers tend to use “research-first” approaches that include protocols, trainings, and coaching sessions around evidence-based programs. But oftentimes the issue is not that a system is unaware of the research, it is uncertainty about how to get something going that fits the local context. This has as much or more to do with local values, personalities, and working relationships as it does with the specifics of a protocol.

Our study finds that engaging a community in a policy codesign process that prioritizes mutual learning, rather than a protocol, not only yielded a high-quality plan but built the relational infrastructure for local collaboration long after the external design facilitators left.