What is this blog series?
This blog series, part of UKHIH’s wider work on academic-practitioner collaboration, provides an overview of existing models for bringing together academic expertise and humanitarian practice to tackle pressing humanitarian challenges. It also highlights three specific case studies that each take a distinct approach towards enabling better collaboration and the development of more timely, effective, and responsible solutions.
In responding to humanitarian crises, collaboration between academics and practitioners can offer mutual benefits. Academic researchers can provide capacity for evidence-based intervention guidance, analytical expertise, and broader perspectives that may be missing or stretched within humanitarian organisations. In turn, practitioners bring practical experience and tacit knowledge that support research outcomes, and humanitarian organisations are able to provide the infrastructure needed to conduct valuable real-world research and pilot novel solutions developed by academics. Despite these advantages, successful collaboration between academics and practitioners can be challenging due to differences in goals, incentives, timelines, and operational constraints.
Bridging academic expertise with humanitarian practice
Through a rapid scoping of existing collaboration models in the humanitarian sector, we identified three high-level approaches towards facilitating academic-practitioner collaboration.
The models roughly fall along a spectrum, with one end centred on making academic expertise more accessible and relevant for practitioners, and the other on training practitioners to develop relevant research-related skills. Models in the middle aim to create shared learning spaces for academics and practitioners to come together and explore challenges and co-develop solutions. Most programmes identified will include a mix of initiatives across these models.
Models more strongly grounded in academia include rapid research schemes where academics are brought in to consolidate existing and emerging evidence around a humanitarian topic in a timely manner to help practitioners more quickly access relevant knowledge during emergencies. Examples include the UKHIH’s Rapid Response Research and the K4D programme led by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). Dedicated research and/or innovation centres within academia are another frequent example where academic expertise is directed towards either generating new knowledge or new solutions to pressing humanitarian challenges. To ensure that emerging research findings and innovations are relevant and feasible for the humanitarian sector, projects within these centres are often driven by concrete humanitarian needs or in partnership with humanitarian actors. For example, the Humanitarian Action Programme set up by the University of Cambridge and the ICRC is a research programme focusing on digital and cyber security regulation, policy, and ethics in humanitarian contexts. Another example, which we cover in more detail in our first case study of the series, is the EssentialTech Centre at EPFL, which specialises in developing sustainable and scalable technological solutions that respond to pressing humanitarian needs.
Blended models focused on creating spaces where academics and practitioners come together to work through humanitarian challenges can also take different shapes. For example, the Social Sciences in Humanitarian Action (SSHAP) platform, our second case study in the series, connects social scientists with humanitarians to work jointly on shared research briefs concerning crises in their regions. Other initiatives, such as PallCHASE – who focus on palliative care in humanitarian settings, are designed as global networks aimed at setting shared priorities and research agendas alongside advocacy work. Other models, such as the Geneva Learning Foundation, build communities of practice for public health practitioners and academics to explore shared and timely challenges.
Finally, practitioner-centred models aim to strengthen the research capacity of practitioners by empowering them with the skills to conduct their own research. Models in this category include research training schemes like the SORT-IT programme, our third case study in the series, which integrate research training directly into practitioners’ work environments. Educational courses like the LEAP Programme by the University of Manchester also fall under this category; through the programme, practitioners are able to develop academic literacy and critical research skills while still working in the field.
In addition to these more comprehensive models, we also identified discrete structures designed to address specific blockers in the formation of academic-practitioner partnerships. For example, memoranda of understanding (MoUs), such as the one between the University of Bath and the Institute for Family Health in Jordan, can facilitate partnerships by reducing the complications of time and resource intensive contract-drafting. Other mechanisms such as pre-project funding schemes can help cover the costs associated with finding relevant collaborators and building relevant relationships. For example, pre-project funding offered by the Research Council of Norway, provides funding for research groups that wish to establish partnerships with organisations based in low- and middle-income countries prior to conducting global health research in these regions.
A common observation across these models is that a number of them were designed in response to major public health crises; this indicates that such moments can represent important catalysts for rethinking existing collaboration structures and reshaping them or creating new ones to allow for more effective ways of working. For example, during the Ebola outbreak, operational actors involved in the outbreak’s response required real-time scientific and interdisciplinary expertise. This led to the formation of operational research units like the Integrated Analytics Cell (IAC), deploying mobile teams of researchers to perform rapid analyses and generate evidence that supports decision-making in outbreak response. The COVID-19 pandemic also reshaped work practices globally, leading to the widespread adoption of remote models such as the COVID-19 Hygiene Hub, which provided rapid support to response actors, allowing them to connect remotely and in real-time with technical experts.
Our rapid scoping also highlighted gaps that future collaboration structures could address. One observation across the examples we identified is that most of them connect academics in high income countries with academics or practitioners in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). SSHAP and SORT-IT are notable exceptions as they both focus on fostering regional exchange within LMICs – this can lead to more culturally relevant and useful outcomes. Identified models also focus predominantly on fostering collaboration in the health and technology fields. This means that there is an opportunity for these collaboration structures to be applied to a larger variety of humanitarian issues and disciplines; for example, SSHAP uniquely focuses on fostering collaboration in the social sciences.
There are a broad range of existing models designed to address specific collaboration challenges, the types of expertise required, and the forms of support needed. When establishing a new collaboration structure, the barriers to collaboration within the particular context should be clearly understood and existing models leveraged to overcome these challenges and create impactful partnerships.
The first case study in this series provides more insight into the EssentialTech Centre at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) as an example of a research centre that fosters collaborations between EPFL’s more than 350 specialised labs and humanitarian NGOs.