Abstract
The Understanding Communities research programme was a collaboration between the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation, exploring how local communities function and can improve people’s lives. It represented a new foray into community- and action-oriented research, seeking to support new approaches, and strengthen the relationships between researchers, policymakers and practitioners.
To capture the learnings from the programme, this report focuses not on the research findings but learning from the experiences of researchers and stakeholders of this type of research approach. We explore what makes community-oriented research in place more or less effective, and what that can teach us about how communities operate in theory and how best to work with communities.