Nicola Carroll and Adam Crawford
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Cultivating ‘communities of practice’ to tackle civic policy challenges: insights from local government-academic collaboration in Leeds’.
Working across sectoral boundaries offers exciting prospects for academics and municipal policymakers to develop innovative solutions to local issues through exploring shared concerns from their distinct professional perspectives. Yet organisational boundaries present well-recognised impediments to research-policy interaction. Drawing on findings from a Review of Collaboration between academics and local government officers in Leeds, we propose that active cultivation of civic ‘communities of practice’ offers a promising approach for connecting research evidence with social, environmental and economic challenges that confront local authorities and their citizens.
Crucially, we argue that boundary crossing relationships between professionals are key facilitators of effective civic collaboration that need to be nurtured and supported organisationally. This means putting inter-sectoral mechanisms in place that help ‘bridge’ institutional divides, without stifling the enthusiasm and dynamism that underpins meaningful knowledge exchange.
Academics and local government officers in Leeds had worked productively together for many years, but often in disjointed, parochial and siloed ways. The Review of Collaboration, undertaken by Leeds Social Sciences Institute, mapped research-policy interaction systematically for the first time. This revealed that 118 projects were in operation over the previous five years, which were highly diverse in their nature, scale and areas of interest. A survey involving 147 staff from both organisations, along with interviews with researchers from the University of Leeds and officers from Leeds City Council, provided insights into ‘what works’, what barriers prevail and what can be done to accelerate knowledge exchange.
Findings from the Review reflect the characterisation of a ‘community of practice’ advanced by Etienne Wenger and colleagues as a ‘community’ of professionals who deepen their knowledge through interactions and relationships in the ‘domain’ of a shared interest and the ‘practice’ of a shared repertoire of resources. Interpersonal relationships were, indeed, found to be the most significant factor in initiating and sustaining research-policy engagement and adopting academic evidence to inform council policies in Leeds. ‘Existing relationships’ were cited as a primary enabler of engagement by nearly three-quarters of survey respondents. Interviewees stressed the importance of mutual commitment to a shared purpose, while trust was deemed an essential component of collaboration in the highly politicised municipal context.
Tellingly, collaboration had often emerged ‘ad hoc’ and succeeded despite the bureaucratic obstacles that cross-boundary working frequently entails. University and council staff commonly attributed the success of their projects to ‘goodwill’ in working collectively to overcome tensions that inevitably arise from differences in professional priorities, timescales and cultures. When asked for suggestions for enhancing research-policy interaction, academics and council officers overwhelmingly called for a more strategic inter-sectoral approach, with clear lines of communication, identification of joint priorities and opportunities to build mutual understanding.
Our Evidence & Policy article presents a model for civic research–policy engagement based on insights from the Review, which proposes that ‘domain-specific’ communities of practice of academics and council officers with shared interests can feed into an ‘inter-sectoral’ community of practice geared towards cultivation of collaboration. In the case of Leeds, a steering group of senior university and council representatives who have been working together to implement recommendations arising from the Review constitutes an ‘inter-sectoral’ community of practice which is introducing measures to facilitate ‘boundary crossing’ between professionals in their specific domains of research-policy interaction. ‘Boundary bridging’ activities so far include: producing a strategy for inter-organisational working; bringing researchers and officers together to identify joint priorities for co-produced research; developing collaborative capacity; and plans for a shared communications platform and streamlined data sharing.
We are not suggesting that cultivating communities of practice is a panacea for civic research-policy engagement; circumstances in every locality are unique and councils are beset by unprecedented budgetary constraints while higher education is undergoing seismic transformation. A further caveat is that academics and council officers were adamant that over-engineering a ‘top-down’ approach would not work as boundary-crossing partnerships require flexibility and creativity. One academic with an extensive track record of informing council policy, for instance, urged professionals to ‘embrace the chaos of working within multiple sets of expectations, working practices and preferences.’ Her counterpart at the council noted: ‘You learn as much from things that don’t work as things that do… it’s about learning about learning openly and honestly.’
Image credit: Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash
Dr Nicola Carroll carried out the research for the Review of Collaboration between academics at Leeds and officers at Leeds City Council in her role as postdoctoral researcher at University of Leeds Social Sciences Institute. She has since worked as a research associate on University College London’s Families and Community Transitions in the time of Covid-19 project, lecturer in Sociology at the University of York and teaching associate in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests span research-policy engagement; families, communities and welfare; and intersections of gender, class and spatial inequalities.
Adam Crawford is Professor of Policing & Social Justice at the University of York and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds. He is co-Director of the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre. His research has focused on policing, crime prevention, urban security, restorative justice and victims of crime. He is a member of the EU funded IcARUS project – ‘Innovative Approaches to Urban Security’ (2020-24) led by the European Forum for Urban Security. He is Deputy Associate Dean for Research (Impact & Knowledge Exchange) in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of York and a member of the Police Science Council, which provides independent advice to the National Police Chiefs’ Council in the UK. He was Principal Investigator for the Review of Collaboration between academics at Leeds and officers at Leeds City Council as former director of University of Leeds Social Sciences Institute.
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Carroll, N. and Crawford, A. (2024). Cultivating ‘communities of practice’ to tackle civic policy challenges: insights from local government-academic collaboration in Leeds. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2024D000000022. OPEN ACCESS
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