Post by Jamie Sims

One of the projects I'll be working on over the coming year is the development of a flexible collaborative evaluation framework for health, nature and place-based interventions, funded through the ESRC SDG Impact Fund. Bringing together Wenjing(Wendee) Zhang, PhD and Yadvinder Malhi from University of Oxford, me from Oxford Brookes University, alongside Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership and The Nature Effect CIC, the project will co-design a practical evaluation toolkit to help organisations delivering nature- and place-based interventions demonstrate their impact and strengthen future funding opportunities. The most interesting thing the project itself, but how it has evolved over months of discussion. Our initial instinct was to design a robust evaluation framework based on the literature and established methods. The more we spoke with practitioners, however, the more we realised we were answering the wrong question. They didn't need another academic framework. They needed something proportionate, practical, and genuinely useful in the realities of day-to-day delivery. Rather than asking organisations to adapt to our research tools, we'll be working with practitioners to develop one that reflects their experience, priorities, and needs. That shift has become the project's defining principle. Universities have enormous expertise to contribute, but our value isn't always in producing evaluation frameworks for publication in academic journals. It can also lie in working alongside the people already delivering change, combining different forms of expertise, and creating knowledge that remains useful long after the research project has ended. If we can achieve that, then the publications will follow, but the impact will have been the point. More here: https://lnkd.in/eZNKTXK3 #KnowledgeExchange #NatureBasedSolutions #HealthyPlacemaking #Evaluation #PublicHealth #InterdisciplinaryResearch #Impact