From sustainability to sustaining work: What do actors do to sustain knowledge translation platforms?

Abstract

Knowledge translation platforms (KTPs) are seen as an important collaborative arrangement between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Yet, their ‘sustainability’ is a recurring issue. Several studies describe what makes KTPs sustainable, and focus on the role of institutional and contextual factors therein, yet few studies show how sustaining of KTPs is done in practice. We therefore performed an ethnographic case-study on ‘sustaining work’ of KTPs in Jordan, Cameroon, and Nigeria. This approach focusses on what KTP actors do to make and keep their platforms productive. We followed the KTP actors for two years and interviewed the KTP actors and their colleagues (n = 63), observed the KTPs' practices (59d), and reviewed related documents to construct thick descriptions of their practices. We collected all data between September 2017 and November 2019. Our analysis revolves around three work processes of translating, contexting, and institutionalising and shows that sustaining takes place within the platform actors' everyday work. Sustaining work, while not necessarily purposive, and without a clear ending, was crucial: the KTPs were not sustainable by themselves, but were actively sustained through the struggles and efforts of the platform actors. This move from ‘sustainability as such’ to sustaining work has important theoretical ramifications for understanding how KTPs work and are made to perdure. Most importantly, this requires a shift from identifying factors that make KTPs sustainable towards constructing environments in which sustaining work can be done. This includes further exploring the role of (research) projects in sustaining KTPs. Additionally, our analysis showed that the sustaining of KTPs was contingent on the capacity of platform actors to forge productive dependencies with other actors and ongoing policy or research agendas. Our analysis thereby offers a practice-based perspective that can inform capacity-building programmes for KTP actors and that can guide the actual sustaining of KTPs.