We seem to be moving in circles
Martien Kuitenbrouwer doet onderzoek naar pragmatisch actie onderzoek als interventie bij vastlopende samenwerkingen in het publiek domein. Haar nieuwe artikel ‘We seem to be moving in circles’ (“Het lijkt alsof we in rondjes lopen”) is gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift The International Journal of Action Research. Vanuit de praktijk in verschillende probleemwijken in Nederland laat Martien zien dat Action Research een belangrijke bijdrage kan leveren aan hoe professionals samen kunnen leren in ‘gedwongen netwerken’ die lokaal transformatie in gang zetten. Niet het ‘wat’ van de samenwerking, maar het ‘hoe’ staat daarbij centraal. Lees hieronder het abstract van het artikel in het Engels.
Action Research can make an important contribution in bringing transformative action to contemporary complex societal problems. Critique upon its limited scope opens the discussion about transferability of outcomes. This paper discusses how facilitative action research enabled transferable and workable breakthroughs to policy practitioners feeling stuck in designed governance networks around complex care and safety problems in the Netherlands. Experiments with facilitated, collaborative conversations of relational inquiry with policy practitioners were conducted in practices in three different cities. Evidence from the three practices suggests that for breakthroughs to be transferable and workable, they need to be able to support a process of reliving and re-experiencing. Reliving and re-experiencing was enhanced when the researcher added a level of abstraction to the conversation by using systems-thinking inspired visuals. This way, policy practitioners were able to grasp the complexity of their situation as well as to see the unintended consequences of their actions. Subsequent naming of the visuals enhanced both the appropriation of the abstracted situation as well as facilitating the broader communication of the experience beyond the group of practitioners involved. Finally, by actively bridging the different practices in three different cities, the researcher was able to connect experiences and so enhance the feeling of reliving and re-experiencing beyond the individual practices. This way, a broader base of knowledge and experience about the problematique, and possible breakthroughs in the complexity of collaboration in designed policy networks, was created.
Kuitenbrouwer, Martien: ‘We seem to be moving in circles’. How facilitative action research generates transferable and workable breakthroughs in policy networks that are stuck, IJAR – International Journal of Action Research, 1-2021, pp. 59-80.
https://doi.org/10.3224/ijar.v17i1.04