Program evaluators and other roles that involve research often navigate environments that do not explicitly define the rules of the research engagement for clarity and risk reduction: decision-makers, decision frameworks, and the ultimate connection between the research and institutional goals. These environments lack research governance.

Here are 5 things that research governance formalizes before a program launches:

1. How the evaluation of the program advances institutional priorities. Earlier in my applied research career, I observed how, without an explicit connection to how evaluating a given program advances institutional priorities, the research lives in isolation. Internal teams will not understand how the evaluation affects their work and, in some cases, may even block the evaluation by creating unnecessary friction and refusing to collaborate toward a shared goal. To avoid this, leadership must explicitly tie the function of program evaluation to institutional priorities.
   

2. The decisions the research will require, and who is accountable for making each decision. As a consequence of the first “research failure” above, when the various decisions the research will require are not made explicit, organizations will suffer from having too many middle managers weighing in. Such decisions are not solely within the purview of the evaluator but also require executive leadership, including how the program evaluation as a whole will be designed to advance institutional priorities. When these decisions are made haphazardly, the executive gets pulled into discussions about research execution. As a result, no one is accountable for these decisions because everyone is making them.
   

3. Ownership and accountability for the research agenda. When this is unclear, the research agenda keeps changing scope, and external stakeholders (such as funders) keep checking in for detailed research updates and custom analyses and outputs. Without defined ownership for the agenda, the executive cannot exercise full authority or accountability for what the evaluation ultimately produces.
   

4. What constitutes a “finding” in your context. When a program evaluation is high-stakes, evaluators need clear frameworks for what constitutes a meaningful and actionable finding in a given context. Depending on an organization’s theory of change, a generational gap between how an educational program affects younger and older people may not actually matter for how the organization structures the program or allocates resources moving forward. When leadership is not aligned on an interpretive framework for the evaluation, the organization struggles to handle politically sensitive findings, external stakeholders may not understand the findings, and the executive is left reacting defensively to the public response to the research.

5. Measures of institutional success. Complex evaluations of programs or interventions that are thought of as too expensive or requiring too much team capacity can lack defined criteria for internal and external success. For some organizations, the strategic information gathered from an evaluation may be worth the cost of fundraising and staff investment. Without measuring the success of the evaluation itself, leadership cannot defend any outcome of the evaluation.

Research governance is a leadership function that must be formalized before the research launches.

When someone says this, the organization is defining the project scope, goals, and priorities long after execution has begun. The executive starts doing operational work as the team realizes it doesn’t have the authority to make certain decisions. The person leading the initiative underneath the executive ends up revisiting or reverse-engineering the institutional purpose of the initiative. All of the decisions that must be made are made in haste, leading to strategic drift and raising the risk of project failure. And the unforgiving timing of election cycles only amplifies this risk.

“Building the plane while flying it” is a diagnosis of research governance failure. The solution is not to create more processes specifically for the initiative. Process does not govern anything—process does not define what decisions must be made under what circumstances, how they will be made, and who will own them. Process only reflects governance established beforehand. Without strong research governance, the research process either adds more confusion to decision-making or becomes an unnecessary constraint.

Major initiatives that lack research governance create financial, reputational, and strategic risks to the movement. Expensive initiatives create financial risks, resulting in cash flow issues and the inability to meet the project scope. Highly visible initiatives create reputational risk, resulting in damaged relationships with peers or funders who had specific expectations from the initiative. And these risks heighten the potential for the research to fail by either being misaligned with the needs of the movement or simply delivered too late for organizations to use it in a given election cycle.

When research governance is established before execution, the organization is intentional about anticipating risks at each stage of the project. Decision rules for different risk scenarios, and the people who will own those decisions, are defined before the pressure of project delivery ramps up. The initiative’s purpose is explicitly tied to institutional priorities, and key outcomes are defined as guidelines that structure decision-making and risk-taking. The initiative has a stronger strategic foundation to set the research up for success. Governance established before execution enables the executive to retain authority over research direction rather than execution. Research governance is a leadership function that is established before execution scales.

Me at the LEAD Filipino Texas Fly Pinay Leadership Summit holding a workshop on Protecting Pamilya From Mis/Disinformation. I’m holding a small microphone and looking at a projection screen, and wearing black pants with a floral print, a pink vest and black t-shirt, pink eyeglasses, and a Zimi Air KN95 mask.

Just two years ago, white-led organizations urgently called on voters to “save democracy.” This call assumed that democracy was a universal condition. Democracy for Filipino Americans has never been, and is not, given.

Filipino Americans descend from people who fought against Spanish and American colonization; fought with the United States in WWII for the unfulfilled promise of citizenship; and organized labor strikes in the 1960s under the threat of white mob violence for dancing with white women. Filipino Americans were subjected to segregation from white America: bans on interracial marriage, racially restrictive covenants, and businesses that refused their patronage. Today, civic engagement groups like LEAD Filipino offer Filipinx studies curriculum to help build Filipino American political power.

When the white-led civic engagement space neglects research with and for communities that have these experiences, the ecosystem invests in messaging frameworks and mobilization tactics that assume all communities experience American democracy the same. In fact, Filipino Americans were more likely than all other Asian American groups to be very concerned about election violence and being prevented from voting in 2024. After the election, leaders across the space had to explain where we failed to “save democracy.”

Executive leadership in research organizations holds authority over the underlying assumptions in research priorities and design. Governance established before execution mitigates the risk that research is misaligned with democratic realities.

Research organizations across the civic engagement space are navigating a challenging funding climate that has reduced their capacity to carry out their work. Many organizations have laid off staff to stay afloat, and the staff that remains must maintain their output. To solve this capacity problem, some have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) in the research process, especially for the more time-intensive research activities: synthesizing qualitative data. The idea is that an agent can take the first pass at analysis, freeing up a human to take on higher-value tasks in parallel. If an AI-assisted employee can accomplish more, then the capacity problem is solved. The institution believes it has delegated time-intensive and easily automated work. It has actually delegated interpretive authority.

Interpretive authority to define what constitutes a finding in a given cultural context belongs to leadership. An agent lacks cultural competency, cannot infer stakeholder needs, and cannot place the research in a broader context with the progressive movement. If I had delegated analysis and interpretation to AI, the data point that led to a shift in our research direction would’ve been ignored. Without an interpretation framework established before execution, leadership delegates its own authority over the interpretation to AI.

When an organization releases “findings” that are wrong or contextually inappropriate, accountability still lands on leadership. Leadership must publicly defend research insights that were not developed within an authorized interpretation framework. In the civic engagement space, introducing AI into the research process without a defined interpretation framework risks reputational exposure.

Before AI even enters the research process, leadership must define the interpretation framework for analysis and establish governance for the use of AI. Leadership determines what counts as a valid finding. Authority over interpretation belongs to leadership.

Research governance is a leadership function that is formally contracted before an initiative launches.

A key part of this initiative was the use of an ad hoc community committee that would advise the institution as the research progressed. The committee included academics, culture workers, and corporate people. The committee would be convened regularly to solicit its feedback, but it held no formal decision-making authority. The committee could not force the institution to redirect the research if it became harmful, nor could it override the institution’s conduct during data collection. The committee was expected to participate, not share governing power.

I was the only internal Latina staff member at the convening that night. I was a researcher at the institution, but I wasn’t assigned to this initiative—I was there to shadow the process. The lead researcher was white. And they weren’t present that night. Community members connected with me, and my presence offered the initiative informal legitimacy. The institution viewed our connection as interpersonal and incidental. As the initiative went on, community members became less engaged, despite receiving payment to serve on the committee. Ultimately, I left the institution.

When informal interlocutors leave an institution, it loses access to research partners that help it advance its institutional priorities. The institution incurs reputational risk. Performative community authority weakens institutional legitimacy and accountability.

Research governance that assigns formal, specific authority to community members over high-stakes research initiatives produces longer-term strategic advantages by embedding institutional legitimacy and accountability to the community the research is about.

Research governance is a leadership function that is formally contracted before an initiative launches.

When institutions are preoccupied with the external support needed to launch the initiative, they default to internal processes for research management. At the launch, reliance on existing processes feels reasonable because, although the stakes are high, the research itself is viewed as a longer, more expanded scope of a regular project. In the beginning, leaders view these initiatives as just more expensive versions of what the organization already does—not initiatives that risk reputational exposure, field positioning, or the institution’s financial well-being. Misaligned findings heighten each of these risks.

Where Process Breaks Down
Internal research management processes were built for execution. They were not built for the decisions that precede it. Process cannot govern an undefined strategy for the initiative—why the initiative exists, why the institution must launch it now, and how the initiative will advance the institution. Process cannot govern decisions about which data points are important, the language used to report them, and how to communicate politically sensitive findings.

When it’s time to analyze the data, the research manager is given a strategic decision on what to report without the authority or a strategic framework. When many external stakeholders are involved in the initiative—funders, practitioners, and other research organizations—they exert varying levels of influence on what the research should report. Funders need to see how the research offers a return on their investment by advancing their own institution’s goals. Practitioners need recommendations to apply in their voter outreach plans. And other research organizations want to see how the initiative advances learning and unearths opportunities for future research. The research manager then triages between stakeholders and works backwards to create an interpretive framework under the tight timelines of an election cycle. When the research manager cannot resolve competing stakeholder demands, a governance gap is confused as a skills gap. And the institution sources external support to resolve a problem that governance would have addressed.

When governance is absent, leadership starts executing on the research, analyzing the data, and deciding what to report. Leadership and the research team iterate on interpretative decisions that should have been established before launching the initiative. Leadership and the research team operate without a defined strategic framework. The institution risks failing to deliver on its commitments and missing a narrow window to influence stakeholders’ decisions in a looming election cycle.

Research Governance vs. Research Management
Research governance is not research management. Research management executes on strategy, including applying the interpretive framework to the data. Research governance establishes the strategy of the initiative, decision rules, accountability, and an interpretive framework for data analysis. Research governance is a leadership function that must be established before execution.

The structural condition behind that blame is a governance gap: a lack of accountability structures at the executive level. In major civic engagement initiatives involving high costs, risks, and numerous external stakeholders, research leadership is often scoped operationally as project management, residing in the middle of the organization instead of at the top.

Who absorbs the cost?
Without a defensible rationale before execution, the purpose of the initiative is unclear to funders, partners, and even internal staff. As a result, funders and partners demand different outputs from what was planned. The research director then spends hours re-litigating the scope of the initiative. And internal staff struggle to communicate the value of the research to community practitioners—often the communities whose data was used for the research.

When this happens, accountability that belongs to leadership is offloaded to lower-level staff. In progressive civic engagement organizations, these people are often members of marginalized communities. And the executive who championed the research abdicates power to influential stakeholders while distancing themselves from frontline accountability.

When governance failures accumulate across the field, organizations become more risk-averse to undertaking large, multi-stakeholder research initiatives. This risk aversion forecloses research breakthroughs for the communities that need these insights the most.

The case for research governance architecture
Research governance architecture is the structure that establishes executive-level accountability before execution begins. When conflicts over scope, purpose, and stakeholder demands emerge, the governance architecture is the single source of truth to reference. Decision rules are built-in to help reconcile competing priorities as the needs of advocacy and civic engagement groups shift.

That single source of truth prevents downstream extraction. The purpose of the initiative is clear to funders and partners supporting the research, as well as internal staff. Stakeholders understand the boundaries of scope requests. And the interests of the communities most affected by the research are factored into decision-making.

Governance architecture keeps accountability at the top
Major civic engagement research initiatives are too big to fail. Establishing governance before execution prevents failures and extraction from the very communities such initiatives often hope to serve. Governance protects internal staff from absorbing the accountability that belongs to leadership. Research leadership is a governance function that exists at the executive level.