Research Co-production Within Humanitarian Health: Reflections on Our Practice

Research co-production is recognized as important for humanitarian health actors, as part of the growing drive towards localizing and decolonizing aid. Despite recognition that co-production is challenging to implement, reflexive accounts of co-production efforts remain limited. In this paper, we critically examine the role of co-production within a multi-partner research collaboration in Lebanon involving multiple academic, civil society and government-affiliated partners based in the UK and in Lebanon. Through interactive reflection sessions and interviews with research team partners, we document how co-production principles were embedded into our project, explore contextual factors influencing the collaboration, identify successes and challenges to co-production and identify future opportunities for research co-production. We find mixed understandings of co-production between team members and siloed efforts to co-produce within our partnership. We identify key challenges to co-production including contextual factors related to Lebanon and COVID-19, institutional power dynamics, budgets, difficulties in engaging service users and availability of stakeholders to co-produce, while mapping examples of successful co-production in our project. Our study emphasizes the importance of ensuring shared understandings of the scope of co-production at the outset of projects and suggest the collaborative analysis processes provide a key opportunity for researchers to embed co-production principles.