Lisa Denney’s research while affiliated with La Trobe University and other places

This paper explores the experience of a collective of pracademics who work together at the Centre for Human Security and Social Change at La Trobe University. While there is some emerging scholarship on pracademics as individuals, in this paper we seek to fill a gap in the literature related to the collective practice of a pracademic team. Developed through a structured process of reflection and critical engagement with our own practice, we analyse the challenges and tensions inherent in working as pracademics navigating multiple universes. This includes the impact of misalignment of incentives in academia and industry, our identities as largely white researchers supporting locally led development in the Asia-Pacific and Indigenous Australia, and our positionality within the wider systems we seek to change. We offer suggestions for how pracademics can exploit the shifting incentives resulting from the impact agenda, bring practitioner perspectives to bear on contemporary academic debates, and work more collectively within and across organisations. Our collective experience provides insights into how pracademics can carve out space within academia and play an effective role in informing development practice.

Development policymakers and practitioners face a range of challenges to using research. This paper draws on an action research project that aimed to investigate the individual and organisational drivers that contribute to, or inhibit, greater use of research in international development organisations, and test strategies to shift them. We convened a group of practitioners and researchers from 12 diverse international development organisations to undertake action research projects within their own organisations. Analysis of the portfolio of action research projects identified five organisational factors which are the basis for improving research use and 15 practical strategies for implementing organisational change. Taken together, these organisational factors and strategies can assist in improving the integration of research in international development organisations and support more evidence-based policy, programming, and advocacy.

Though not new, adaptive approaches to development are increasingly becoming mainstream in development discourse and practice. An underlying premise of adaptive development is that outcomes cannot be assumed or planned in advance, such is the case with linear, technical approaches to development. Rather, development programmes must be responsive both to their environment, and to learning along the way in order to find successful pathways to change. Advocating adaptive development, Aidan Craney, Lisa Denney, David Hudson and Ujjwal Krishna highlight the need for adaptability and reflexive practice in development work that centres a strong emphasis on cultivating a deep understanding of the local context and investing in learning. Drawing on case studies from the Philippines, Sri Lankan and Oceania, the authors offer examples of adaptive management, problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA), and thinking and working politically (TWP) as a way of providing pedagogies, strategies and tools relevant to students and practitioners of development.

Drawing from the literature, we explore the generic attributes or features of programs that seek to support developmental leadership, the features of particularly successful examples of such programs, as well as some of the systemic challenges agencies and the sector more broadly face in working in these ways. From this we set out a range of potential research avenues to guide this area of research under DLP III.