Funding policy and funders’ role in driving academic-practitioner collaborations

This report highlights the key ideas and findings of a mapping exercise conducted in the initial phases of the ‘Funding Policy and Funders’ (FPF) sub-project, which developed out of the 'Exploring the Potential of Academic-Practitioner Collaborations for Social Change (AcPrac)1 project hosted under the LSE’s AFSEE programme. The AcPrac project has two key objectives: 1) to contribute to AFSEE’s theory of change by exploring the conditions that are conducive to developing generative processes of knowledge exchange between academics and practitioners; and 2) to examine the methodological and epistemological challenges of researching inequalities, and particularly how the latter might be reproduced through the research process itself. The FPF sub-project investigates how the funding landscape shapes and drives AcPrac collaborations for social change, focusing on funding programmes that broadly address the reduction of inequalities.