An open-access course that teaches the foundations of advocacy and organisational change to researchers, research software engineers, and research technical professionals, structured around the UNICEF five-step advocacy cycle.
Abstract
Systemic change across the digital research landscape is required to reduce the environmental impact of digital research, but while many researchers and technical professionals are motivated to act, they often lack the skills required to translate motivation into lasting organisational change. We present an open-access course that teaches the foundations of advocacy and organisational change to researchers, research software engineers, and research technical professionals. Structured around the UNICEF five-step advocacy cycle, the course covers stakeholder analysis, power mapping, coalition building, storytelling, framing and messaging, and evaluation. It is grounded in the UK policy landscape, including the Concordat for Environmental Sustainability and the UKRI Environmental Sustainability Strategy, and uses a fictional case study to make concepts concrete. The course is designed as a dual-layer resource in which workshop slides and extended self-study notes are contained in a single source material. A short pilot was delivered at the NetDRIVE Net Zero DRI Summer School in June 2026. The course is freely available under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
I-REACCH (Inclusive Research Environment Achieved through Culture Change) is a Wellcome-funded initiative based at the University of Leicester, focused on co-designing practical interventions to improve research culture. A separate working paper offers a fuller account of the project’s approach and ambitions (Angell, Ladipo and Lemos, 2025).
This working paper explores insights from two I-REACCH participatory workshops on research culture, held at the University of Leicester in June 2025 and January 2026. The workshops brought together researchers, professional services staff, and research culture practitioners to reflect on collaborative approaches, barriers and enablers, and the long-term sustainability of research culture change in higher education. Discussions were structured around guided questions and visual prompts to support collaborative reflection.
Across the two sessions, participants explored collaboration as a mechanism for change, the structural and cultural barriers shaping research environments, the conditions required to sustain change over time, and the impact of wider sector pressures.
The findings highlight that while there is strong commitment and emerging good practice, sustaining change requires clearer structures, recognition, and continuity. I-REACCH is supporting a series of activities to begin to address these challenges.
E. Angell, Kike Ladipo· LIAS Working Paper Series· 0 citations
This paper develops a sustainability-by-design framework for school–university partnerships (SUPs) based on the case of the Teaching Clinic (TC), a research-based service-learning (RBSL) SUP. We use the TC's history of scaling and forking to reflect on the framework's sustainability. We argue that sustainability is best understood as a partnership's capacity for adaptive resilience: the ability to remain functional, equitable and generative under changing conditions, rather than merely persisting over time or securing ongoing funding.
We present a conceptual synthesis of the TC's design architecture, collaboration routines and documented implementation lessons across several countries and educational systems from 2019 to 2026. We treat the TC as a modular boundary-spanning infrastructure comprising roles, routines and boundary objects that reduce transaction costs and support continuity beyond individual actors. We position the TC within the broader landscape of research–practice partnerships, professional development schools and existing sustainability frameworks, drawing on comparative design knowledge generated through multiple adaptation and scaling waves of the TC.
We propose (i) six TC building blocks that should remain invariant when scaling, (ii) an “interface” logic that specifies which elements can be adapted without diluting the partnership mechanism and (iii) a six-lever sustainability-by-design framework (reciprocal value, support in-frastructure, governance and role clarity, adaptive modularity, recruitment pipeline and trust and legitimacy) that supports partnership durability and transferability. We discuss equity mechanisms embedded in the model's design and identify persistent limitations, including facilitator dependency and quality variation across projects.
The paper contributes an actionable, leader-facing framework for scaling SUP models internationally without losing conceptual coherence. It advances comparative insight by distinguishing between what must remain stable and what can be localised, offers a definition of sustainability centred on adaptive resilience rather than funding or longevity alone, and critically examines the TC's limitations alongside its affordances.
D. Froehlich, Julia Raberger· School-University Partnershi...· 0 citations
What is new?
As financial pressures intensify and research becomes more complex and interdependent, universities are increasingly prioritising collaborative work within and beyond academia. This shift has revealed a significant gap in co-production and collaboration and a critical need for professional support in identifying stakeholders and developing and facilitating partnerships across disciplines and sectors. This paper addresses that gap by combining an evidence base grounded in academic literature with insights from practice to create a transferable framework for research-enabling staff. The framework provides the tools needed to drive the culture shift essential for universities to navigate complexity, strengthen collaboration, and remain competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.
What was the approach?
This work combines systems thinking, stakeholder theory, and qualitative, practice-based insights. The conceptual framing draws on a literature review of stakeholder theory from business and management, particularly Freeman’s foundational research, alongside Meadows’ concept of leverage points for systemic change, Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner’s systems convening as a leadership practice, Wheatley’s work on leadership in complex systems, and the UCL Co-Production Collective model for inclusive stakeholder engagement.
The framing is further informed by 33 facilitated conversations conducted in summer 2024 with a diverse cross-section of the UK research ecosystem, including technicians, research managers, professional services staff, and others in research-enabling roles. These in-depth discussions explored power, leadership, recognition, and cultural dynamics in collaborative environments and illustrate emergent patterns that informed the theoretical framing and practical examples presented in this paper.
What is the academic impact?
Effective stakeholder engagement for co-production requires a systematic approach underpinned by the often-invisible infrastructure of research enablers. Achieving this frequently requires a culture shift within the institutions in which we operate. Universities therefore need to design and sustain systems that actively facilitate this culture shift. This paper gives evidence, a transferable framework, and applied examples to equip research enablers to participate fully in this structure by providing a framework and embedding co-production principles in theory and practice.
What is the wider impact?
Behind every successful collaboration is an invisible architecture: research enablers who build trust, connect systems, and create the cultural conditions for co-production. This research makes that architecture visible and actionable, driving a culture shift as institutions design and sustain the infrastructure needed to embed collaboration and co-production at scale.
Helen Elizabeth Bryant, Alys Kay· Journal of Research Manageme...· 0 citations
Digital learning is increasingly seen as a key driver of educational improvement; however, its effectiveness depends largely on how schools plan and implement their digital infrastructure. This study examines instructional leaders' perceptions of stakeholder participation in the planning of digital infrastructure for schools. Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory, the study adopted a qualitative research approach within an interpretive paradigm. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with purposively selected instructional leaders and were analysed thematically. The findings reveal that instructional leaders perceived meaningful stakeholder participation as fostering ownership, inclusivity, and contextual sustainability of digital learning environments, while exclusion was associated with misaligned resources, resistance, and widened inequities. Instructional leaders emphasised the importance of continuous engagement, capacity building, and flexible communication strategies to support effective collaboration. The study contributes to existing scholarship by foregrounding stakeholder participation as an ecological process that spans multiple system levels. It recommends institutionalising participatory planning practices to ensure that digital infrastructure initiatives are contextually responsive, equitable, and sustainable.
V. R. Nkuna, A. Mawela· International Journal of Edu...· 0 citations
This paper examines why carbon-intensive practices at academic conferences persist despite growing sustainability commitments within higher education institutions (HEIs). While prior research has addressed the environmental footprint of academic events and the technical feasibility of hybrid or decentralised formats, limited attention has been paid to the organisational and institutional mechanisms through which unsustainable conference practices are reproduced. The paper addresses this gap by investigating how organisational routines, institutional incentives and governance arrangements shape the adoption of more sustainable conference models.
The study adopts an exploratory empirical design combining a structured literature review with survey evidence collected during the 2024 EGOS Colloquium. The analysis examines travel and accommodation choices as indicators of the extent to which sustainability commitments are translated into conference-related practices.
The findings show that sustainability awareness alone does not lead to lower-impact behaviour. Carbon-intensive practices persist because they are embedded in organisational routines, reinforced by prestige- and networking-based participation norms, and weakly challenged by existing governance mechanisms. The study suggests that the persistence of unsustainable conference models reflects not only individual choice but also broader institutionalised patterns of academic participation.
The paper contributes to organisation theory and behaviour research by conceptualising conference sustainability as an organisational governance problem rather than only an environmental or technical one. It extends current debates on sustainable academic events by showing how institutional incentives and organisational inertia constrain change and by proposing an (E)ESG-based framework to support the assessment and redesign of conference governance in HEIs.
M. Pucci, Marta Jakob, B. Quacquarelli· International Journal of Org...· 0 citations
Whole-institution approaches (WIA) have become a promising instrument promoting holistic implementation of sustainability in the global discourse on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Yet, the literature often presents idealized models of the ‘sustainable institution’ that may be difficult for institutions to translate into practice. This article reviews the literature on whole-school and WIA to sustainability learnings and practices across all levels of education in order to identify recurring elements that support institutional transformation. The literature review was conducted in 2024–2025 to inform the development of a UNESCO guidance tool on the WIA. The review identifies 14 components that frequently appear as areas of action within WIAs, including leadership, curriculum, pedagogy, governance, institutional culture and community engagement. The article conceptualizes these elements as flexible ‘building blocks’ that institutions can pick and choose to design their version of the WIA, according to the institutional and local context. This component-based perspective moves away from the understanding of the WIA as an ideal state of an institution and aims to support new forms of engagement with the WIA, inform policy dialogues and contribute to further research and institutional practice on sustainability transformation in education systems.
Katrin Kohl, Charles Hopkins, Isabel Toman et al.· Journal of Education for Sus...· 0 citations