Abstract

Effective research management is crucial in delivering equitable partnerships by addressing power imbalances and promoting fairness, transparency, and mutual respect. Key practices where research management can support this include helping co-designing research agendas, equitable resource allocation, and enhancing capacity-building to benefit partners. Emphasizing shared decision-making, trust-building, and clear communication helps ensure all voices are valued. Additionally ensuring equitable authorship and ethical governance, further reinforce fairness. Together, these strategies foster inclusive, sustainable, and impactful research collaborations that address global challenges and respect the diverse contributions of all partners.

Whilst this can go so far, four centuries of colonialism have entrenched inequities in the global higher education system, concentrating resources and knowledge in former colonial powers while marginalizing institutions in formerly colonized regions. This legacy has created a disparity in academic resources, infrastructure, and opportunities, perpetuating systemic inequalities.

Therefore, higher education institutions (HEIs) in the Global North have a crucial role to play in supporting their counterparts in the Global South, particularly given the significant disparity in staffing and financial resources. In many ways it needs to be an unequal partnership weighted to the global south. This is needed as research offices grapple with underfunding and insufficient staffing, which hampers support for “traditional” academic engagement. HEIs in the Global North must address these disparities by fostering partnerships that recognise the knowledge and experience of global south institutions as well as their challenges.

In addition to offering financial and staffing support the global north needs to listen to and learn from global south colleagues and share expertise where required. Such support not only enhances the landscape in the Global South but also enriches global academic exchange and promotes equitable partnerships. Drawing on experiences garnered through the partnerships between LMICs and the the UKs “Research management network for LMIC partnerships”, in this session we will explore successful examples of how research management practices have supported real (un)equal partnership support. The authors come from Edinburgh, Nottingham Trent, Reading, Oxford and University College London but bring the experiences of over 50 institutions whose RMAs are part of the informal network. The network has been running for a number of years to share experiences of the unique kind of partnerships for international development that we are working on.

These include how to ensure contracts are fair and transparent, exchange schemes to help UK and LMIC RMAs understand better how the others professional services operate and how project administration in LMICs can provide broader university support. This kind of research management, which goes beyond the usual confines of what we might see with national partnerships, has gone someway to delivering the equitable international partnerships we are striving for.