5 Things That Research Governance Formalizes Before Programs Launch
Last week, Kapwa Sol Insights shared our approach to research with the Oregon Program Evaluation Network by discussing research failures that are actually research governance failures—and how to spot them and prevent them.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.