Abstract
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are groups of people that interact regularly to deepen their knowledge on a specific topic. Thanks to information and communication technologies, CoPs can involve experts distributed across countries and adopt a ‘transnational’ membership. This has allowed the strategy to be applied to domains of knowledge such as health policy with a global perspective. CoPs represent a potentially valuable tool for producing and sharing explicit knowledge, as well as tacit knowledge and implementation practices. They may also be effective in creating links among the different ‘knowledge holders’ contributing to health policy (e.g., researchers, policymakers, technical assistants, practitioners, etc.).CoPs in global health are growing in number and activities. As a result, there is an increasing need to document their progress and evaluate their effectiveness. This paper represents a first step towards such empirical research as it aims to provide a conceptual framework for the analysis and assessment of transnational CoPs in health policy.The framework is developed based on the findings of a literature review as well as on our experience, and reflects the specific features and challenges of transnational CoPs in health policy. It organizes the key elements of CoPs into a logical flow that links available resources and the capacity to mobilize them, with knowledge management activities and the expansion of knowledge, with changes in policy and practice and, ultimately, with an improvement in health outcomes. Additionally, the paper addresses the challenges in the operationalization and empirical application of the framework.
Highlights
Proactive management of knowledge is today seen as a key strategy to ensure the performance and success of organizations or systems
This paper focuses on a specific knowledge management strategy: the community of practice (CoP)
Most of the papers provide theoretically interesting and rich ideas, but, with few exceptions [24,25], none of the documents presents an empirical application of an evaluation framework, highlighting a gap: despite the wide theoretical and practical interest on CoPs, there is a lack of evidence-based propositions for their evaluation
Summary
Proactive management of knowledge is today seen as a key strategy to ensure the performance and success of organizations or systems. Information and communication technologies have experienced tremendous developments, allowing knowledge management These changes have led to the emergence of new strategies of knowledge management in global health.a Most of the time, they tap into the power of online technologies (emails, listservs, websites, blogs, social media, etc.) to enhance connections between experts, but many care about cultivating a certain degree of face-to-face interactions. Developing and implementing such strategies may require a substantial commitment of resources from sponsors, members, and facilitators. This step allows the delineation of a research agenda for the empirical application of the proposed framework.b
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