Reimagining Governance for a Flourishing Research Culture

At Durham we are committed to a culture that enables everyone in the research environment to flourish. We have initiated a project called Flourish@Durham to work towards that end. Consultations with staff and students indicate that they are ambitious about research and want to feel they are doing well, but they are being held back by structures and processes they find difficult to influence. There is a pervasive narrative that Durham’s research governance structures are overly hierarchal, top-down and fail to engage the community. While Flourish@Durham has been able to focus on specific staff groups, this institutional level problem needs a more ambitious approach. This project will investigate the effectiveness of our research governance structures at departmental, research institute (URI) and university level while at the same time initiating Shadow Committees to trial innovative approaches. We are committed to two major principles in this project. First, that staff across the research environment should have the opportunity to engage; and second, that the way we conduct the project should reflect what we want to achieve. We will, therefore, seek the support of our community to understand problems of research governance while offering opportunities to that community to transform it.