Inquiry themes

Funding arrangements can make genuine partnerships within co-produced research projects harder to achieve at both the design and delivery stages. For instance, there may be rules prohibiting how partners can be paid. University systems may be inflexible or not take the tight cash flows of smaller, voluntary organisations into account.

Contracts or intellectual property rules and regulations can also undermine the ideal of equal partnerships. For instance, legal terminology can be difficult to understand, introduce transactional logics around providing services, or force partners to give away credit for jointly developed work.

Many researchers feel that co-produced and participatory work is often not as highly valued or rewarded, even though it is increasingly encouraged by funders. The continued prioritisation of certain kinds of outputs over others can disincentivise participatory researchers and is especially challenging for those at the early career stage.

Ethical reviews tend to be static and can often reaffirm traditional boundaries between researchers and 'researched'. One-off ethical approvals do not help researchers negotiate the ethical complexities of sustained, deep-value relationships required for co-producing research.