Collaborative Capacity Research Articles

Collaboration between key populations in a global partnership for health and human rights: Lessons learned from ‘Bridging the Gaps’

ABSTRACTBecause HIV and AIDS key populations share common social-cultural factors challenging their sexual health and rights (e.g. stigma, criminalisation), there is an assumed benefit of collaborative programmes where various key populations work in solidarity. In this paper, we reflect on how partners collaborated in a complex alliance of over 100 different NGOs, representing and supporting three key populations – lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, sex workers and people who use drugs – working across 16 countries. We used a multiple-method approach of participant observation, qualitative interviews, and a survey to explore the benefits, facilitators and challenges of collaboration. Results show that motivators for collaboration included being part of the larger funding structure with applied impacts, a repressive human rights context, and intersectionality. Barriers for collaboration included identity politics, stigma, and constraints regarding the appropriate timing of new collaborations. Finally, facilitators include practical support for engagement, the framing of human rights in a medical agenda, and recognition of implicit differences. We conclude that for building the capacity for collaboration among socially marginalised groups it is important to develop trust and the ability to recognise strength in difference beyond the initial identification of shared norms and common goals.

The One Health Leadership Experience at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Competency in One Health (OH) leadership was emphasized in the Roadmap for Veterinary Medical Education in the 21st Century in 2011. Since then, several educational interventions have been aimed at increasing awareness and capacity for inter-professional collaboration. At the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, a 3-day event, the One Health Leadership Experience (OHLE), was initiated in 2012 and continues to the present. The event targets students entering their first year of a health professional program and consists of presentations by invited OH guest speakers, networking sessions, small-group case discussions of OH scenarios, and leadership development through panel discussions and interactive small-group dialogues. Post-conference surveys, a 5-year follow-up survey, and two focus groups were conducted to evaluate the impact of participation in the OHLE. After the event, the proportion of students who said they clearly understood OH and its goals was substantially higher than before: 86% versus 14% in 2012, 91% versus 23% in 2013, and 69% versus 24% in 2014. In the 5-year follow-up survey, most respondents (90%) indicated that attending the OHLE increased their interaction with other students from health sciences colleges or schools on campus. Also, most (81%) believed that OH should be formally taught in their program and 80% anticipated implementing, or had already implemented, OH practices after graduation. The OHLE increased participants' awareness of the importance of interdisciplinary approaches and is a successful educational model that can be adapted to health professional curricula at other institutions.

Capability Building of Coordinating with Other Educators for Preschool Teachers in Educating Developmentally Disabled Children in Gia Lam District, Hanoi, Vietnam

The paper deals with the theory and practice of collaborative capacity building for preschool teachers with other educator forces in care and education of children with developmental disabilities in Gia Lam district, Hanoi, Vietnam. The results of theoretical and factual studies indicate that: Developmental disabilities are the development of high-level functional disabilities in the central nervous system during development, which presents a distortion or problem of cognitive abilities, communication, social, learning, attention, etc. Fostering the capacity to coordinate social forces in caring for and educating children with developmental disabilities is a continuation of training to develop the capacity of coordinating the social forces in care and education. The capacity of coordinating with other educator forces for teachers of preschool children with developmental disabilities vary in its objectives, methods and forms. Despite the concern and care from managers and authorities, there are still many teachers who do not fully understand the problem. The development of coordination plans with social forces in the education of children with developmental disabilities has been paid attention, but only in the general plan on the coordination of social forces. Measures should be taken to improve the effectiveness of capacity building for preschool teachers with the education staff in developmental care for children with disabilities to develop a standardized, consistent and consistent system of procedures. It is essential to improve the quality of early childhood education and help preschool teachers equip themselves with knowledge, skills and skills in coordination with other social forces.

African fire histories and fire ecologies

Patterns of fire are changing across African savannahs, rainforests, fynbos, woodlands, and Afroalpine and montane forests, with direct environmental and socio-ecological consequences. Fire variability has implications for biodiversity (Beale et al. 2018), vegetation patterns, grazing quality, carbon emissions, protected area management, and landscape heterogeneity. Fire is a crucial component of savannah functioning and structure and is essential for maintaining its biodiversity. Long-term records are key to understanding drivers of fire variability and contextualize recent and ongoing land-use changes that altered fire responses to climate and vegetation changes (e.g. Ekblom and Gillson 2010, Colombaroli et al. 2014). As indigenous forest loss continues and modification through selective harvesting and land-use encroachment accelerate forest changes, the importance of historical disturbance regimes is increasingly relevant for assessing past ranges of variability and to define management targets that support more resilient socioecological systems (Whitlock et al. 2018). But how can the research community engage and integrate with land-management practitioners and policy developers? And how can we promote knowledge transfer and collaborative capacity between the international community and the next generation of African scientists?

The Policy Roundtable Model: Encouraging Scholar–Practitioner Collaborations to Address Poverty-related Social Problems

Robust exchange between those who make and carry out social policy and those who study social conditions can improve both policy and research. This article presents a programing model, Policy Roundtables, which promotes interchange and creates greater capacity for collaboration between two disparate communities, academic researchers and local policy practitioners. Data come from a formative evaluation of the host center’s programing. We asked academic scholars and community-based practitioners about what they learned from participating in the Roundtables and how they used that knowledge. Analysis of interviews with nine respondents and surveys of 35 informants suggest that the Policy Roundtables inform participants, spread learning back to organizations, and create social capital that can be deployed in the form of collaborations between research and practice communities.

Reconceptualizing interorganizational collaborations as tensile structures: Implications of conveners’ proactive tension management

ABSTRACTConveners, as the main organizers of complex inter-organizational collaborations (IOCs), experience tensions as they make decisions based on collaborators’ competing interests and ideas. This paper theorizes conveners’ tension management as their proactive efforts to shape the IOC processes – as opposed to reactive responses to emergent tensions – and examines how they are related to IOCs’ collaborative capacity. A comparative case analysis of two IOCs in regional planning reveals that conveners’ organizing practices that actively promoted tensions contributed to creating a more dynamic and tension-resistant collaborative environment, compared to those of conveners who tried to prevent tensions. Using tensile structure as a metaphor, the author theorizes about when and how proactively promoting tensions can enhance collaborative capacity.

Birthplace in Australia: Antenatal preparation for the possibility of transfer from planned home birth

ObjectiveThe aim of the study was to explore how women and midwives prepare, during the antenatal period, for the possibility of intrapartum transfer from planned home birth. DesignA Constructivist Grounded Theory approach was taken in order to focus upon the social interactions and processes that emerged. SettingUrban and regional areas in four states of south eastern Australia. ParticipantsThirty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with women and midwives. FindingsThere were three sub-categories relating to preparation for the possibility of transfer. These were 'Building the midwife–woman partnership', 'Fostering professional connections' and 'Reducing uncertainty'. The reciprocal trust inherent in the midwife–woman partnership helped women feel safe in relation to the possibility of intrapartum transfer to hospital. Midwives who had positive transfer experiences spoke about their commitment to fostering professional connections with hospitals and health professionals as a part of building the capacity for collaboration if, and when, a transfer occurred. Reducing uncertainty involved preparation that included not only providing information and emotional support to the woman around the possibility of transfer, but also arranging for her to book in to a back-up hospital.

An empirical study of collaborative capacity evaluation and scheduling optimization for a CPD project.

In a collaborative product design project, reasonable resource allocation can shorten the development cycle and reduce cost. Team capacity evaluation and a task-team scheduling model are presented. A collaborative team capacity model is constructed, and a 2-tuple linguistic method is used to evaluate the capacity of collaborative teams. Next, the matching degree between design task and collaborative team is defined. A collaborative product design scheduling model considering task-team matching is developed. Combined with the simulated annealing operator, based on the single-coding strategy, self-adaptive multi-point cross and mutation, an improved genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the model. Finally, a case study is presented to validate the method.

Kansas Leadership Studies Summit: Cultivating Collaborative Capacity for the Common Good

Bringing together leadership educators from 11 programs in Kansas, the Leadership Studies Summit fostered new initiatives and strengthened collegial networks. The summit responded to local and national expressed needs for intensive dialogue focusing on collaboration and capacity building among leadership educators for advancing the common good. This application brief will share the format and outcomes of this dialogue, including recommendations for future multi-institutional collaborations.

Language matters: developing educators’ expertise for English learners in linguistically diverse communities

ABSTRACTThe population of English learners (ELs) continues to grow in schools across the United States and around the world. In this article, we share one urban university’s collaborative approach to building educational capacity for cultural and linguistic diversity through professional development efforts that brought together stakeholders from classrooms, schools, communities, and districts. This grant-funded project aimed to build educator expertise to effectively support and positively influence students’ language development and disciplinary learning. Grounded in sociocultural theory, we used an apprenticeship framework of teacher development, strategically planning and implementing collaborative capacity building efforts to foster learning across individual, interpersonal, and institutional planes. In this paper, we share the results of professional development efforts across three years of this project, drawing from observation, interview, and focus group data. Findings indicate that classroom-, school-, and district-level educators developed knowledge of discipline-specific language development, pedagogical skills for effective EL teaching and learning, and leadership abilities to positively shape institutional responses to their culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. Implications focus on fostering teacher professionalism through bottom-up development of EL-specific expertise and expanded opportunities for leadership.

Shopping Decisions Made in a Virtual World: Defining a State-Based Model of Collaborative and Conversational User-Recommender Interactions

A three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world (VW) facilitates users? interactions as they immerse and engage themselves in a shared virtual space. This type of interface may be especially useful when consumers utilize home electronics for accessing personalized online services. Previous research has focused on a collaborative conversational recommender (CCR) framework, in which a synchronous online 3-D interface for multiple consumers integrates with a recommender. In this article, a state-based model of user-recommender interaction that allows users to move from different states of interaction (i.e., individual and collaborative) among users, is defined. It is then evaluated by users and compared with an individual approach. The results from this research demonstrate that the collaborative capacities proposed in the framework improve user experience and significantly increase the performance of the recommendation process, i.e., users take less time in achieving the desired service.

A Knowledge‐Based Approach to Public Value Management: A Case Study of Change Implementation in Disability Services in Western Australia

AbstractThis paper provides a knowledge‐based perspective to understanding public value management (PVM). As distinct from other approaches to public administration, PVM focuses on collaborative capacity building for the creation of public value. To develop the notion of PVM further, we explore the role of a knowledge‐based strategy in a case study of change implementation in 18 disability service organisations in Western Australia. Our findings show important inter‐relationships between knowledge management strategy, adopting a person‐centred approach to service provision, and sustainability of change implementation. We discuss the implications of the study for disability sector change management and for the further exploration of the strategic role of knowledge management capabilities in the study and practice of PVM in public sector administration. The paper explores the relationship between an organisation's knowledge capture and sharing systems and processes and its ability to implement change in a way that generates long‐term benefits for both public sector employees (e.g., engaging with key stakeholders to generate innovative solutions for serving client needs) and clients (i.e., increased well‐being through better service design and support).

Developing Collaborative Capacity for Students in Vietnamese University

Cooperation is the foundation of life and social progress. It is at the heart of interpersonal relationships, family bonds, economic and legal systems and other aspects. In this comprehensive partnership, with the purpose of equipping young generations with necessary skills during Vietnam's comprehensive development, cooperative capacity is key to all success in work as well as life. This paper focuses on clarifying the rationale for collaborative capacity and measures to develop collaborative capacities for learners in teaching in our current universities.

Facilitating epistemic fluency through design thinking: a strategy for the broader application of studio pedagogy within higher education

ABSTRACTTomorrow's professionals will require an enhanced capacity for collaboration, cooperation and creative thinking. Markauskaite and Goodyear (Markauskaite, L., and P. Goodyear. 2016. Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education: Innovation, Knowledgeable Action and Actionable Knowledge. Springer) have posited epistemic fluency as the pedagogical approach necessary to prepare graduates for increasingly complex challenges. They have provided a framework for creating epistemic learning environments but not a clear implementation strategy. This paper draws parallels between epistemic fluency and design thinking to position the design studio as a relevant pedagogical model with an established set of strategies for facilitating epistemic fluency. A series of experiments undertaken to optimise the studio environment for the development of epistemic fluency will be drawn on to illustrate its suitability. The intent is to provide guidance for how studio learning could be adapted for use within other disciplines and to highlight the challenges teachers need to address within this process; particularly, that epistemic environments require the continuous exercise of design thinking by both teacher and learner.

Coastal Gastronomy: Envisioning a South Carolina Seafood Trail

Promotion of local seafood and related culture has become an important strategy for enhancing economic sustainability of struggling commercial fishing businesses in coastal tourism destinations. Theme-based tourism trails can be catalysts for identifying, recognizing, and sustaining important aspects of culture, heritage, and industry in rural regions. Food-based trails have become a popular strategy for enhancing the economic viability of local food producers while highlighting the authentic qualities of a tourist destination. This study explored potential for development of a seafood-themed trail on the coast of South Carolina (USA) where communities represent varying levels of economic dependence on commercial fishing and tourism. Methods included 31 personal interviews with stakeholders from the seafood and tourism sectors across the region and a follow-up survey (n = 13) and workshop (n = 15) to facilitate input and consensus. Stakeholders supported formation of a coast-wide seafood trail as an education and decision-making tool targeting tourists. They highlighted collaborative capacity for marketing and partnership, diversity of local seafood products and experience, and economic benefits and improved competitive advantage for local businesses as strengths and opportunities. Challenging issues for development and long-term viability included limits to local seafood supply, regional differences in both heritage and seafood products, financial constraints, maintaining interest among stakeholders and visitors, establishing leadership, and defining membership criteria.

Evaluating strategies for sustainable intensification of US agriculture through the Long-Term Agroecosystem Research network

Sustainable intensification is an emerging model for agriculture designed to reconcile accelerating global demand for agricultural products with long-term environmental stewardship. Defined here as increasing agricultural production while maintaining or improving environmental quality, sustainable intensification hinges upon decision-making by agricultural producers, consumers, and policy-makers. The Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) network was established to inform these decisions. Here we introduce the LTAR Common Experiment, through which scientists and partnering producers in US croplands, rangelands, and pasturelands are conducting 21 independent but coordinated experiments. Each local effort compares the outcomes of a predominant, conventional production system in the region (‘business as usual’) with a system hypothesized to advance sustainable intensification (‘aspirational’). Following the logic of a conceptual model of interactions between agriculture, economics, society, and the environment, we identified commonalities among the 21 experiments in terms of (a) concerns about business-as-usual production, (b) ‘aspirational outcomes’ motivating research into alternatives, (c) strategies for achieving the outcomes, (d) practices that support the strategies, and (e) relationships between practice outreach and adoption. Network-wide, concerns about business as usual include the costs of inputs, opportunities lost to uniform management approaches, and vulnerability to accelerating environmental changes. Motivated by environmental, economic, and societal outcomes, scientists and partnering producers are investigating 15 practices in aspirational treatments to sustainably intensify agriculture, from crop diversification to ecological restoration. Collectively, the aspirational treatments reveal four general strategies for sustainable intensification: (1) reducing reliance on inputs through ecological intensification, (2) diversifying management to match land and economic potential, (3) building adaptive capacity to accelerating environmental changes, and (4) managing agricultural landscapes for multiple ecosystem services. Key to understanding the potential of these practices and strategies are informational, economic, and social factors—and trade-offs among them—that limit their adoption. LTAR is evaluating several actions for overcoming these barriers, including finding financial mechanisms to make aspirational production systems more profitable, resolving uncertainties about trade-offs, and building collaborative capacity among agricultural producers, stakeholders, and scientists from a broad range of disciplines.

Building collaborative capacity: supporting tribal agriculture and natural resources in a changing climate

AbstractA working group was held during the 2017 National Adaptation Forum to build collaborative capacity on issues related to Tribal agriculture and natural resource management in a changing climate. We developed three synthetic themes from these discussions and dialogue to highlight on-going opportunities, but also demonstrate areas for continued engagement with Tribes related to effective agricultural and natural resource management. We hope this forum demonstrates the critical importance of partnerships, and motivates further coordination and collaboration among Tribes, universities and Federal agencies.

Industry-university collaboration and absorptive capacity: an empirical study in a Swedish context

In this paper, we examine the role of firms’ absorptive capacity in industry-university collaboration and, in particular, whether absorptive capacity moderates the effects of university collaborati ...

Pedagogical Possibilities: Arts-Based Practices of Collaborative Time for Teaching the Future

In a present that seems to hurtle toward an apocalyptic future, and the threat it poses for making rash decisions that may do more harm than good, the capacity to collectively experience—and suspend—time is an important component of teaching the future responsibly and creatively (as opposed to destructively and reactively). This essay reflects on one pedagogical approach to accomplish this—arts-based practices featured in WOUND, a study center for collaborative time that exists as both an online archive and physical space. As practices that also register in the field of community organizing, activism, and political life, the tools and trainings at WOUND present opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration aimed at imagining and realizing alternative forms of communal life. I explore how the arts-based tools and trainings curated in WOUND's archives might comprise an arts of futurity and provide innovative teaching tools for classroom use. Aimed at cultivating capacities for collaboration and attention in relation to the way things are and could be, the tools at WOUND have the potential to develop a wide-awakeness in the present and spark imaginings of what might become possible.

Collaborative Transdisciplinary Research in a Small Institution: Challenges and Opportunities.

Aim/PurposeIn this paper, we discuss how a Transdisciplinary (TD) and a Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) initiative was conceptualized, developed, implemented, and sustained at a small academic institution with limited research infrastructure, emphasizing die role of capacity building.BackgroundMost examples of die implementation of TD research come from large-scale initiatives in research-intensive institutions or centers widi multiple resources to establish collaborations among experts from different disciplines. However less is known about die implementation of TD and CBPR initiatives in small academic settings.MethodologyThis paper includes a discussion of the challenges and lessons learned of this process in a teaching-intensive Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), which included a research component as part of the institutional priorities when it transitioned to a 4-year college in 2001.ContributionWe hope diat our experience helps odier researchers in similar institutions to engage in diis type of research.FindingsIn this case, a collaborative TD and CBPR initiative was successfully implemented despite limited resources for capacity building and research infrastructure, as well as diversity among researchers and community members.Recommendation for ResearchersTo sustain institutional collaborative capacity in this type of institution, authors recommend continuous capacity building efforts and the development of modules and/or courses to provide formal TD training for junior faculty while encouraging researchers to interact and collaborate. In addition, the importance of the role of the community liaison is highlighted.Impact on SocietySuccessful TD and CBPR initiatives may have a positive impact on the reduction or elimination of health disparities which involve complex phenomena that requires a broad view from different perspectives.Future ResearchEven though capacity building can facilitate the implementation of TD and CBPR, many challenges arise as an inherent result of community engagement and the integration of different disciplines. Thus, the need of continuous reflection to acknowledge them becomes critical for advancing TD and CBPR efforts.