Musings on collaborative health policy - 15 years on

Strategies to facilitate an understanding of successful collaborations between researchers and policy makers in the article "Twisting the Lion's Tail: Collaborative Health Policy Making in British Columbia" have relatively good face validity and fairly good construct validity. It's been my experience, however, that strategies that work for one project don't necessarily work for others and strategies that work for parts of one project don't always work for other parts of the same project. What seems important is that health policy collaborators establish clarity on roles, responsibilities and rules of engagement for specific projects, knowing prospectively that these will vary across time and depending on the nature of a project.