Next Generation – Collaboration for Development a three-year IDRC-funded program (2017—2019), was a joint initiative of Cooperation Canada and the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID). Next Generation aims to position Canada as a leader in innovative, multi-stakeholder international development and humanitarian research, practice and policy development. The program’s overarching goal was to encourage better collaborations, and identify and promote encourage better collaborations, and identify and promote new ways of working among practitioners, researchers, academics, students, and policy developers.
The program adopted a whole-of-society approach to global development research, practice and policy development, and aimed to foster conditions for enhanced and sustained collaboration between civil society and academia. Our ability to do development work and deliver humanitarian assistance rests largely on the ability of different actors to work together, and exchange knowledge and expertise. When scholars and practitioners come together to do research, there is a co-production of knowledge that leads to research that is timely, relevant, and based on evidence, which feeds into programming and policy. Marrying practice and research can generate policy that is more responsive to what is happening on the ground.
To achieve this goal, the program supported a series of partnerships between academics and practitioners, using a range of different models of collaboration – communities of practice, working groups, annual conferences, leaders’ forums, outreach events, speakers’ tours, and others – to stimulate new thinking and generate timely and policy-relevant joint research. The program tested and refined these models of practitioner-academic collaboration, generating processes, products and relationships that Cooperation Canada and CASID both hope will outlast the program’s time frame. Check out the program overview below for greater details on research partnerships.