Can we have it all? navigating trade-offs between research excellence, development impact, and collaborative research processes

The “gold standard” of impactful international development research involves equitable north-south partnership, interdisciplinary collaboration, and co-production with non-academic actors, ideally including local communities. Such participatory and collaborative approaches are intended to have longer-term benefits, strengthening capacity for research, innovation, and knowledge exchange. Admirable though this may sound, it’s easy to see how it might appear overwhelming to researchers expected to fulfil these requirements while also ticking the boxes of “traditional” assessments of academic excellence. Valeria Izzi asks, when it comes to research for development, can we really have it all? Or are we setting the bar so high that researchers will be discouraged from even trying – instead embellishing their proposals with enough impact, partnership, and co-production jargon to win funding, before getting on with research as usual?