Welcome to Research for Impact.
My name is Jesse DeMaria-Kinney,
and I work with Oxfam Great Britain,
a humanitarian development and campaigning organization.
But for this course, Research for Impact,
I'll be your guide and I'll take you on
a journey as we learn about thinking about and how
academic research can actually contribute to
changes at various levels and at various scales.
And I am Mark New, and I'm director of the African Climate and Development Initiative
at the University of Cape Town or ACDI as we're known for short.
We are a research and training institute that
works at the intersection of climate and development issues in Africa,
and much of our philosophy around research is
what we call trans-disciplinary or engaged research,
working with society and with people for impact.
And I am going to try and bring some of
our experiences in the way we've tried to do research to
illustrate some of these principles of
Research for Impact that we're going to cover in the course.
As part of that, we are going to use climate change
and climate change adaptation as the lens
through which we explore Research for Impact as a process and as a methodology,
but many of the principles,
in fact all the principles that we cover are
equally applicable in other forms of research.
This is a course about rigorous academic research and how that can
contribute to and change policy and practice at various levels and different scales.
It's very much about changing people's behaviors and attitudes,
and a part of this is understanding the importance of doing research with people
or research for people as opposed to doing it research on people.
Yeah. So, I think what we trying to explain in this course
is a shift from the idea that research produces results
which are then somehow taken up in policy and practice to
a much more engaged and process-based way
of maximizing the chance of the research being used.
And this process of involving the key actors,
whether it's communities, policymakers,
NGOs in the research process from the outset,
both in co-designing what the research questions might be
and being part of the research team so that they're also generating evidence
and through that process maximizing their understanding of the problem and the ability
to use the evidence that emerges in
their own roles and responsibilities for change and for impact.
The processes we're talking about are really
around co-production all the way through the process,
which then means that we have a process of building capacity,
building knowledge, which then creates the conditions for
change during and after the research process.
And ACDI and Oxfam were part of
the Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions, a research consortium,
and this was one of four large research consortium under
the wider Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia, CARIAA.
This are four trans-disciplinary networks working across over 40 institutions.
There were very strong component of
research impact to these networks and to the overall initiative.
Why was something like that appealing to you as the head of
ACDI to become part of and in fact to lead?
Well, it's part of our research philosophy is that we want to have impact at scale,
and the way that the research program was set up, to be trans-disciplinary,
meant that we thought they were great opportunities to do research differently
and really have much greater impacts than the traditional way of doing research.
So, it was sort of a really nice opportunity in terms of taking
our research philosophy and applying it in a major research program that
where we could really hope to have
quite early impacts because of the way we were doing
the research through this engaged trans-disciplinary research process.
And you mentioned before Oxfam and the different types of work that we do,
but within this context and the large research project, this collaboration,
this strategic partnership that we had,
why was that important for this type of work?
Well, essentially it was a very synergistic set of competencies and skills.
So, within the university environment,
we have great expertise in designing rigorous research processes and analyzing the data,
and although there's an appreciation amongst many researchers of the need for
Research for Impact and some understanding
at least in theory of the approaches one might use,
what Oxfam brought was this really practical on
the ground experience from working with communities at
the coalface of social development and
climate adaptation right through to interacting with policy makers.
And so, what we had here were two sets of experience that really at the intersection of
those was the nexus of the Research for Impact, philosophy and methodology.
And so, by working together,
we would be able to take the best of both of our skill
sets and we hope to do research much,
much better and in a more impactful way working
with communities and with policy makers than we had previously been able to.
Well, I'm glad it happened because it was quite an experience,
and I think this is an excellent opportunity, this course,
Research for Impact, to be able to share
this experience and to be able to share what we've learned in this process.
Yeah. Because I think at the beginning,
we sort of had an idea of how this might work,
and over the five years of the project we've learned along the way,
we've had to be flexible,
change what we're doing as as we've learned and as circumstances emerge.
And so, in a way our learning process through trying
to adopt a Research for Impact approach within
ASSAR is similar to the philosophy of Research for Impact as well,
which is iterative processes,
engagement, learning, course correction if you needed.
So, we've almost been like a mini Research for Impact process
all the way through ASSAR as well as trying to have impacts itself.
Excellent. Well, I am looking forward to
sharing their experience and also certainly learning as we go as well.
And drawing on the incredible wealth of experience that
has been developed through the CARIAA program.
And as we'll see in the course,
we draw on that extensively through different course lecturers and examples that we use.
Excellent. Well, let's go. Let's take a look.
Yep.
Mark NewDirector
Jesse DeMaria-KinneyACDI Associate
