Across the sector, work focused on equity has become more contested, more scrutinised – and, for some colleagues, more personally risky.
In that context, collaboration isn’t just beneficial, it’s becoming essential. Not only can cross-sector working produce stronger, more credible outputs, it can also distribute risk, offering a degree of protection and collective confidence to those taking this work forward.
For research funding, this presents a particular challenge. Decisions about who gets to apply, how opportunities are allocated, and what counts as fair process are increasingly shaped by scarcity, complexity, and institutional caution.
In the current global climate around EDI, there is a growing sense that sticking one’s institutional head above the parapet carries an unwelcome level of risk, while working collectively can help build a little more bravery into the system.
Collaboration under pressure
One response to this challenge has been to create spaces where institutions can step briefly out of competition and work collectively on shared problems. In early 2024, the University of Oxford convened a cross-sector forum bringing together research funders and universities to explore how recommendations from its work on equity in research funding might be taken forward in practice. The premise was simple: what might become possible if institutions paused competition long enough to rethink how it operates?
What followed was not just a set of outputs, but a sustained experiment in collaborative working under pressure. Two priorities emerged quickly from this work: inclusive demand management, and the use of positive action in research funding and careers. Neither is new, but both have become harder to navigate in a funding landscape defined by scarcity, heightened scrutiny, and institutional caution.
Demand management – limiting the number of applications that can be submitted – forces organisations into choices about who gets to compete at all. Positive action, meanwhile, offers one route to addressing persistent inequalities but is frequently constrained by legal uncertainty and a high degree of perceived risk.
In both cases, the challenge is not simply technical. It is shaped by judgement, confidence, and the conditions in which decisions are made. It was here that the value of working collectively became most visible – and where trust, flexibility and care proved as important as shared priorities.
Lessons learned
First, collaboration helped to distribute and make sense of risk. Questions around legality, fairness, and proportionality are often navigated cautiously within individual organisations, particularly where reputational stakes feel high. Working across institutions created space to test assumptions, surface shared concerns, and build more confident, risk-aware approaches. What might feel difficult or exposed in one organisation became more manageable when approached collectively.
Second, it enabled a level of openness that can be hard to sustain locally. In a more contested environment, some colleagues feel unable to share examples of practice or to be publicly associated with EDI work. A cross-sector setting, grounded in trust and shared purpose, made it easier to acknowledge uncertainty, learn from partial or imperfect approaches, and draw on a wider base of experience than any single institution could offer. Even within these collaborative communities, some contributors chose not to be named on outputs – noting fear of potential repercussions on them personally.
Third, it created the conditions for sustained progress, rather than isolated effort. Momentum in this kind of work depends on more than goodwill. Regular engagement, shared ownership, and visible progress between meetings helped turn intention into output. Crucially, this was underpinned by a realistic understanding of scope: the aim was not to resolve inequity in research funding in its entirety, but to produce practical tools that organisations could use within their own contexts.
What emerged from this process were two substantive, sector-facing resources: guidance on inclusive demand management, and a framework for positive action in research funding and research careers. Their significance lies not only in their content, but in what they represent; an example of how collaboration can make progress possible in areas where individual institutions might otherwise hesitate.
At a time when work on equity is becoming more contested and more cautious, the risk is not just that progress slows, but that it quietly stalls altogether. If acting alone increasingly feels untenable, then collaboration is not just a route to better practice, it is a condition for making progress at all. The challenge now is not whether we value collective action, but whether we are prepared to invest in it as a sustained and necessary way of advancing EDI in higher education.
The author would like to thank Claire Edwards, Strategic Research Development Manager (Research Growth) at the University of Nottingham, Ipshita Ghose, Head of Research Strategy and Development at the University of Birmingham, Fiona McClement, University Lead for EDI at the University of Edinburgh, and Faye Robinson, Associate Director Research Development at the University of York.
