The project itself grew out of a scholarly frustration familiar to many historians. Danish architectural history of the twentieth century, sometimes called the golden age of Danish design, has been told largely through the achievements of a handful of men, including architect Arne Jacobsen, planner Steen Eiler Rasmussen and landscape architect C. Th. Sørensen. When Riesto and Steiner, both trained architectural and cultural historians teaching landscape architecture students, looked at their reading lists and their own lectures, they noticed that women were almost entirely absent, even though women had trained as architects in Denmark since at least 1908. Digging into indexes, footnotes and anecdotal asides in the standard literature, they began to find women’s names everywhere. The project they built set out to revisit Danish architectural history between the 1930s and the 1970s and to tell a story not about heroic individuals but about the collaborations that actually bring built environments into being.

That scholarly aim carried an organizational irony the two leaders could not ignore. A project dedicated to dismantling the myth of the star architect would be led, under conventional academic structures, by a star researcher. The image of the powerful genius professor over junior faculty, they argue, mirrors the hero narratives of architectural history and obscures how innovation actually emerges: within frameworks that foster collaboration, psychological safety and what organizational theorists call generative tension. So they decided the leadership structure of the project had to embody its feminist ethics. Drawing on principles articulated by the UK-based organization We Are Feminist Leaders and by education scholar Tanya Fitzgerald, who describes feminist leadership as a collective social practice involving conscious awareness of one’s own power, they adopted guiding commitments: sharing power, building collective action, practicing shared learning, establishing proactive accountability, and transforming power.

The structural obstacles were immediate. Several Danish grant schemes they applied to permitted only one official research leader. Their workaround was pragmatic and quietly subversive: some proposals named one of them as official leader, others named the other, while every application text stated explicitly that leadership would be shared in practice. They also divided the funds equally in their department’s internal accounting, signaling to local management that both had been equally successful in attracting money, a matter with real consequences for tenure and promotion. The funding bodies raised no objections, though the authors note the practice is unusual in their field. Even so, a senior colleague once advised them not to collaborate at all, warning that working together might hinder their individual careers, an observation that itself illustrates the individualizing pressures the pair were trying to resist.

In searching for alternatives, they examined the leadership models that dominate Danish university management training, as conceptualized by leadership coach Søren Barlebo Rasmussen. The first is the missile or rocket model, in which a recognized researcher leads a team along a strict pathway toward a single goal, with mid-career researchers in a machine room and early-career staff on fixed-term contracts at the bottom of the hierarchy who, in the authors’ pointed reading of the metaphor, deliver the fuel, then burn out and fall away as the project lifts off. The second is the star club model, where senior researchers share infrastructure but work independently, with leadership diffused into invisible systems. The authors find problems with both. The rocket model is monodirectional, rigid and dependent on one individual, with no checks and balances. The star club distributes power but lacks explicit accountability, leaving room for favoritism and the exploitation of those without permanent positions. Neither, they conclude, aligns with feminist principles of proactive accountability and awareness of power relations.

The model they built instead was a dyad: leadership shared between two people at the level of project management. They found precedent in creative fields, including the Danish architectural firm Cobe, art museums such as Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and Spritten in Aalborg, and Copenhagen’s Betty Nansen Teatret. To develop the concept, they worked with organizational psychologist Thea Mikkelsen in sessions they describe as a kind of preventive couples therapy, designed to preempt conflict and build the trust needed to address disagreements constructively. Mikkelsen pointed them to the management book Power of Two by Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller, whose elements of successful two-person partnerships mapped closely onto their practice: complementary strengths, a shared mission, fairness, trust, forgiveness, unselfishness and mutuality, the idea that a partner’s success matters as much as one’s own.

Translating these principles into daily practice required concrete tools. The pair held regular individual development meetings with every team member and joint workshops to make the division of work transparent. They compiled a document outlining the formats of all recurring meetings, because informal ambiguity, they recognized, concentrates power in leaders’ hands. Inspired by the collectively led Danish consultancy Analyse og Tal, team meetings began with a walk around the table in which everyone, the leaders included, reported not just what they were working on but how they felt about their workload, using a traffic-light system: green meant capacity to help others, red meant too much to do. Everyone found themselves in the red zone at times, but after intense periods the team deliberately built in recuperation, an approach the authors connect to regenerative leadership practice and to feminist attunement to bodily and natural cycles, in deliberate contrast to the idealized, masculinized image of the researcher working around the clock.

The results, the authors report, were measurable and intangible. The project produced international publications, invitations from research institutions, a podcast, a guidebook, educational materials for Danish primary schools, and an exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center that attracted 90,000 visitors. It was the first history research project nominated for the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship’s Diversity Award and received two dissemination awards from the University of Copenhagen. Team members gave positive feedback on the working culture, and the project generated new networks and professional friendships. The authors are candid that shared leadership is resource-intensive and that their model is highly contextual, not a template for universal replication. They also acknowledge the structural barriers that remain, from funding rules to reward systems, and they cite the hashtag #PleaseDontStealMyWork, under which junior colleagues have shared testimonies of senior staff misusing their power, as evidence that accountability in research leadership is a real and urgent problem.

The deeper claim of the study is that leadership need not be embodied in a single person to be effective. Shared leadership, Riesto and Steiner argue, puts collaboration at the center even among those holding the most power, creates space for creative abrasion in the productive sense defined by organizational theorist Linda Hill rather than an abusive environment, and offers a way to join feminist theory with practice, to walk the talk. They situate their approach in the tradition of what Debra Meyerson calls tempered radicals: change that works within existing systems through values rather than outright revolution. Even within the hierarchies of the university, they conclude, shared leadership based on feminist ethics can deliver excellent research while making an impact beyond it. At a moment when academia faces funding competition, disinformation, anti-academic politics and the disruption of artificial intelligence, their experiment suggests that the power of two may be a more robust engine for knowledge than the power of one.

Subject of Research: Feminist shared leadership of university research projects, tested through a Danish architectural history case study

Article Title: Putting feminist leadership principles into practice: the transformative potential of shared research project leadership

Article References: Riesto, S., & Steiner, H. (2026). Putting feminist leadership principles into practice: the transformative potential of shared research project leadership. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1888194. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1888194

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1888194

Keywords: feminist leadership, shared leadership, research project management, higher education, academic hierarchies, architectural history, women in architecture, University of Copenhagen, organizational culture, psychological safety, power-sharing, academic careers

The research focuses on what engineers call source-grid-load-storage, or SGLS, microgrids—systems that integrate generation units, transmission infrastructure, consumer loads, and energy storage devices into a single coordinated whole. These systems are increasingly vital as renewable energy penetration grows, because they can smooth out the inherent variability of solar and wind power while improving overall energy utilization. But coordinating all these components requires a sophisticated control hierarchy. At the lowest level, so-called droop control keeps voltage and frequency stable through fast local adjustments. Above that sits secondary control, which compensates for the deviations that droop control inevitably introduces, and tertiary control, which handles system-wide economic optimization.

Historically, secondary control was implemented in a centralized fashion, with a single controller gathering data from every distributed generator and issuing commands. That approach, however, suffers from well-known drawbacks: it is inflexible, difficult to scale, and demands substantial communication bandwidth. Distributed control schemes, which allow generators to coordinate by exchanging information only with their immediate neighbors over a sparse communication network, have emerged as the preferred alternative. Yet this very reliance on inter-node communication opens the door to two distinct dangers. First, the data flowing between nodes can be intercepted, revealing private operational details. Second, intercepted data can be weaponized: attackers can tamper with it or block it entirely, undermining the coordination that keeps the microgrid stable.

Previous attempts at privacy protection have each come with trade-offs. Differential privacy, a technique borrowed from the statistics world, adds noise to transmitted data to mask true values—but in a power system, that noise manifests as harmonic distortion that can degrade power quality. Encryption-based approaches avoid distortion but introduce transmission delays that clash with the real-time demands of grid control. A third family of methods, based on state decomposition, takes a different tack: instead of obscuring data with noise or scrambling it with ciphers, these schemes split each generator’s communication signal into multiple substates and transmit only one of them. Because an eavesdropper never sees the complete picture, the true state remains hidden—without any distortion or delay penalty.

The new work builds on this state-decomposition foundation but adds two crucial innovations. The first is an event-triggered communication mechanism. Rather than having every generator broadcast its substate continuously, the system uses a dynamic threshold to decide when a transmission is actually necessary. Each generator maintains an internal auxiliary variable that evolves over time, and information is only sent when the local error between the generator’s current state and its last broadcast value exceeds this threshold. As the system approaches steady state, the threshold naturally widens, and the frequency of communications drops dramatically—reducing the burden on the communication network without sacrificing control accuracy.

The second innovation addresses the cyber-attack problem head-on. The researchers consider a hybrid threat scenario combining two of the most notorious attack types: false data injection, or FDI, in which an adversary secretly alters shared information such as power measurements flowing through the network, and denial-of-service, or DoS, in which communication links between generators are simply blocked. To defend against both, the team designed a deep neural network estimator that learns the relationship between each generator’s locally available signals and the aggregated signals it normally receives from its neighbors. When an attack corrupts the incoming data, the DNN can reconstruct what the genuine signal should have been, allowing the controller to compensate and maintain stable operation.

Crucially, the training procedure for this neural network is itself privacy-preserving. Conventional data-driven resilient controllers typically require complete system information during their offline training phase—a vulnerability in its own right, since an attacker who eavesdrops on the training data could glean sensitive details about the microgrid’s configuration. The new approach trains the DNN exclusively on pairs consisting of locally available signals and their corresponding aggregated neighboring communication signals, meaning that no complete private information ever needs to be assembled in one place. According to the authors, this makes their scheme the first to simultaneously achieve data-driven resilient secondary control and privacy preservation in microgrid systems.

To back up these design choices with mathematical rigor, the team turned to Lyapunov stability theory, a classical tool for proving that dynamical systems will settle into a desired equilibrium. Their analysis establishes that, under reasonable assumptions—the communication graph must be connected, the injected attack signals must be bounded, and DoS attacks cannot block communication permanently—the closed-loop system remains stable even when the DNN’s estimates contain bounded errors. The analysis also demonstrates that the event-triggered mechanism avoids so-called Zeno behavior, a pathological condition in which infinitely many triggers occur in a finite time interval, which would render the scheme impractical.

Simulation studies on a MATLAB/Simulink platform put the theory to the test using a six-node microgrid model with realistic low-voltage parameters. The results were striking: system frequency converged rapidly to its nominal value with overshoot below one percent, and when a load step change was introduced mid-simulation, the frequency recovered quickly while all six distributed generators remained tightly synchronized. Active power sharing among the nodes achieved a precise ratio of 1:1:2:2:4:4, demonstrating that the controller can enforce proportional allocation even as it juggles privacy and security constraints. Analysis of the triggering instants confirmed that the event-triggered mechanism substantially reduces communication updates as the system settles, validating the approach’s efficiency claims.

The researchers also conducted a parameter sensitivity analysis that offers practical guidance for real-world deployment. They found that the droop coefficient scale exerts the strongest influence on performance: reducing it to half its nominal value caused the power-sharing error to jump dramatically, while increasing it to 1.5 times nominal raised the frequency error. The event-triggering parameter, meanwhile, primarily governs the communication burden—raising it from 0.4 to 1.2 increased the total number of triggering events roughly fivefold, with only minor changes in control accuracy. Another parameter revealed a clear trade-off: enlarging it reduced peak frequency deviation but slightly worsened power-sharing precision. The authors acknowledge that their DNN estimator’s performance depends on the quality and representativeness of its offline training data and may degrade under unseen operating conditions, and they note that scalability to larger microgrids with more generators and communication links remains an open question. Future work, they say, will focus on improving the estimator’s adaptability and extending the framework to time-varying communication topologies and plug-and-play scenarios—steps that could bring this privacy-preserving, attack-resilient control paradigm closer to the microgrids that will underpin tomorrow’s decentralized energy landscape.

Subject of Research: Privacy-preserving distributed secondary control of source-grid-load-storage microgrids against hybrid cyber-attacks

Article Title: Event-triggered distributed privacy-preserving security control of source-network-load-storage microgrid

Article References: Li, Z., Zhang, X., Feng, L., & Liu, Z. (2026). Event-triggered distributed privacy-preserving security control of source-network-load-storage microgrid. Frontiers in Energy Research, 14, Article 1929186. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenrg.2026.1929186

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fenrg.2026.1929186

Keywords: microgrid, cybersecurity, privacy preservation, deep neural network, event-triggered control, false data injection, denial-of-service, distributed control, secondary control, Lyapunov stability, power sharing, smart grid

The paper begins by insisting on definitional precision, because co-creation is a term that has been stretched to cover almost any interaction between researchers and outsiders. The authors define it through four dimensions: shared agenda setting, joint knowledge production, power sharing, and community leadership and ownership. Crucially, they distinguish genuine co-creation from its weaker cousins, consultation, stakeholder engagement and partnership, in which outsiders may be informed or even involved but never hold real authority over what is studied, how it is interpreted, or what is done with the results. To make the assessment rigorous, each dimension is scored on a graded scale rather than treated as a binary yes-or-no attribute, allowing the authors to capture the partial, uneven character of participation that binary labels tend to obscure.

But the analytical innovation goes further. The researchers add a second axis to their framework: the reach of co-creation across the entire research-to-policy-to-advocacy interface, and, most provocatively, the condition of the transitions between those segments. This is a subtle but consequential reframing. Most evaluations of participatory research examine a single project or a single phase, asking whether a study was co-designed or whether a policy brief was co-written. The APHRC team argues that the real vulnerabilities lie between phases, in the handoffs where an evidence-generation project must become a policy engagement effort, or where policy work must be converted into public advocacy. These transitions, they find, were often neither designed, nor evaluated, nor even recorded, leaving the continuity of participation to chance.

To test the framework, the authors assessed six cases drawn from the center’s portfolio, spanning evidence generation, policy processes, capacity strengthening and rights-based advocacy. Each case was evaluated against both axes: the depth of co-creation along the four dimensions and the reach of co-creation across the interface and its transitions. The cases are not named as standalone exposés but serve as a structured sample of the different kinds of work a policy-engaged research institution undertakes, from generating data on urban health and wellbeing to feeding evidence into government processes and supporting community-led campaigns for rights and accountability.

The first headline finding is stark: co-creation in this institution’s practice is substantive where knowledge is produced and weak where authority is held. In other words, communities and non-academic partners were genuinely involved in shaping research questions, collecting and interpreting data, and validating findings, but the levers of institutional and financial power remained firmly in the hands of the researchers and their funders. This pattern will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has worked in participatory research anywhere in the world. It is far easier to invite stakeholders into a workshop to refine a survey instrument than to hand them control over a budget line or the final say over institutional strategy.

The numbers behind that finding are telling. Agendas were substantively shared in four of the six cases examined, suggesting that the center has made real progress in opening up the question of what gets studied. But financial resources were substantively shared in none of the six. Money, the analysis implies, is the last and hardest frontier of co-creation. As long as funding flows from external donors to the research institution and only then, if at all, to community partners, the fundamental asymmetry of power remains intact regardless of how participatory the workshops are. The authors treat this not as a failure unique to their institution but as a structural feature of the global health funding architecture, in which grant-making rules, audit requirements and institutional overheads make genuine fiscal sharing difficult even when everyone involved wants it.

The second major finding concerns those transitions. Co-creation, the study concludes, fails at the seams between research, policy engagement and advocacy rather than within them. A project may be co-created from start to finish as a piece of research, and a policy engagement process may be co-created as an exercise in its own right, yet the moment when one hands over to the other is a moment of institutional amnesia. Community partners who shaped the evidence may not be present when that evidence is pitched to policymakers; coalitions formed during advocacy may dissolve when the research cycle restarts. Because these handoffs were not designed as participatory moments, they were also not evaluated, and because they were not evaluated, they were not documented, which means the sector has almost no institutional memory of how its most important work actually gets done. The authors’ insistence on recording and evaluating transitions is one of the most practical contributions of the paper.

The third finding is that different domains of work can realize different dimensions of co-creation, and these differences are systematic rather than random. Community leadership and ownership, the deepest and most demanding of the four dimensions, was substantive only in rights-based advocacy. That makes intuitive sense once stated: advocacy campaigns are typically built around the communities whose rights are at stake, giving them a natural claim to leadership that they rarely possess over a technical research project or a government policy process. Capacity strengthening and evidence generation, by contrast, tended to realize the earlier dimensions, shared agendas and joint production, without reaching full community control. The implication is that funders and evaluators should not expect every type of engagement to achieve every dimension, but should instead be explicit about which dimensions are realistic and appropriate for which kind of work, and honest about the gap between aspiration and feasibility.

From these findings the authors distill practice guidance organized around five themes: governance, funding, community roles, transitions and assessment. On governance, the lesson is that co-creation must be built into institutional structures, advisory boards and decision rights, not left to the goodwill of individual researchers. On funding, the paper points toward financing models that channel resources directly to community partners rather than treating them as beneficiaries of institutional spending. On community roles, the guidance is to define those roles precisely and early, so that participation is a specified commitment rather than a vague aspiration. On transitions, the message is to design, staff and evaluate the handoffs between research, policy and advocacy as deliberately as the phases themselves. And on assessment, the graded, two-axis framework offered in the paper is itself proposed as a tool that other institutions can use to audit their own practice with similar candor.

The authors are equally clear about the limits of what they have done. This is a single-institution insider synthesis, a self-assessment by researchers of their own organization’s record, and they state plainly what such an analysis cannot establish. It cannot claim to be representative of the wider field, it cannot eliminate the biases inherent in practitioners judging their own work, and it cannot substitute for independent evaluation or for the perspectives of the community partners themselves. What it can do, and what makes it valuable, is model the kind of honest self-scrutiny that the co-creation movement rarely applies to itself. In a field where the language of participation has outpaced the practice of power-sharing, a twenty-year institutional audit that admits money was never truly shared, and that the most important moments were never recorded, may do more to advance genuine co-creation than any number of aspirational frameworks. The paper’s quiet conclusion is that the next frontier is not inventing new participatory methods but fixing the plumbing: the budgets, the handoffs and the governance structures that determine whether participation is real or merely performed.

Subject of Research: Co-creation practices in research, policy engagement and advocacy at a African health research institution

Article Title: Co-creation in research, policy engagement and advocacy: Lessons and limits from two decades of practice at the African Population and Health Research Center

Article References: Otukpa, E. O., Ziraba, A. K., & Bain, L. E. (2026). Co-creation in research, policy engagement and advocacy: Lessons and limits from two decades of practice at the African Population and Health Research Center. PLOS Global Public Health, 6(9), e0007405. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0007405

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0007405

Keywords: co-creation, global health, participatory research, policy engagement, advocacy, power sharing, community leadership, research-to-policy, APHRC, Africa, health research governance, PLOS Global Public Health

Across mental health research, involvement of people with lived experience has expanded considerably over the past two decades. A substantial body of literature suggests that meaningful involvement can broaden research agendas, surface neglected priorities, challenge deficit-based framings, and produce knowledge more closely attuned to the realities of care and recovery. Co-produced approaches have been associated with improvements in the relevance, ethical quality, and social legitimacy of research, and they challenge long-standing hierarchies between professional and experiential forms of knowledge. Peer Researchers sit at the sharp end of this movement: rather than serving only as participants or external advisors, they help shape research questions, study design, recruitment, data generation, analysis, interpretation, dissemination, and leadership. In principle, this functions as a structural intervention within research systems, redistributing authority over who is considered capable of producing knowledge.

Yet the co-production literature also documents serious risks when involvement is poorly resourced or weakly embedded within institutions. Tokenism, stigmatisation, unequal power relations, emotional labour, exploitation, and involvement that remains procedural rather than substantive are all recurrent concerns. A recent scoping review of lived experience co-design in eating disorder research identified 76 studies but found substantial variation in how lived experience was incorporated, ranging from opportunistic consultation to full integration across the project lifecycle. Methodological reporting was often limited and inconsistent, with many studies stating that lived experience had been included while providing little detail on roles, processes, or actual influence on research decisions. The mere presence of lived experience within a project, the authors argue, reveals little about the authority afforded to contributors or whether their knowledge altered the research at all.

The commentary identifies five connected domains in which challenges commonly arise: recruitment and representation; trauma, stigma, and welfare; power-sharing and decision-making; training and career development; and structural resourcing. These areas overlap in practice—recruitment is shaped by who can afford to participate, welfare by how workloads are organised, power-sharing by when Peer Researchers enter a project, and career progression by whether institutions invest in sustained rather than episodic involvement. In each domain, the authors pair a description of the problem with practical suggestions for more ethical and meaningful participation.

Recruitment emerges as an early site at which inclusion and legitimacy are actively shaped. Opportunities often favour individuals who meet conventional definitions of recovery, are already connected to research networks, or hold formal diagnoses. Self-selection processes may privilege those with stable health, financial security, and confidence in professional environments, excluding people whose insights are valuable but who are distant from services, mistrust healthcare systems because of previous trauma, or fall outside dominant stereotypes of who develops an eating disorder. This compounds existing inequities: racialised communities, LGBTQ+ people, men, disabled and neurodivergent people, people in larger bodies, and older people may all be excluded when their experiences do not align with the field’s narrow historical image. The authors also highlight the representational burden placed on a sole Peer Researcher expected to speak for an entire community, when experiential expertise is inherently situated and plural. Suggested remedies include recruiting beyond specialist services, involving lived experience collaborators in designing recruitment materials and selection criteria, and funding multiple contributors or community partnerships where diverse insight is sought.

Trauma, stigma, and welfare present a second cluster of difficulties. Lived experience accounts consistently document services experienced as stigmatising or disbelieving, with people described as manipulative, attention-seeking, or insufficiently motivated—dynamics that constitute forms of epistemic injustice, shaping whose accounts are treated as credible. For Peer Researchers, the perspectives for which they are invited into research may remain subtly mistrusted, reframed as pathology, or contained within it. Emotional labour is central rather than incidental to this work, which can involve engaging with accounts of illness, treatment, and recovery that resonate with or unsettle one’s own history. Eating disorders are often marked by fluctuation, relapse, and long-term management rather than a simple transition from illness to wellness, yet research environments may assume contributors are either fully recovered or too unwell to participate. The authors advocate trauma-informed participatory frameworks organised around anticipation, flexibility, reflection, safety, and relational trust: discussing risks in advance, allowing people to opt in or out of particular tasks, adapting meeting schedules, and making explicit that stepping back from a task will not be interpreted as failure. Crucially, they stress that risk should be assessed in relation to specific tasks rather than attached to lived experience as a general category, and that protective exclusion—however well-intentioned—can reproduce the very judgements about competence that Peer Research is meant to challenge.

Power-sharing is perhaps the most consequential domain. Lived experience may be welcomed mainly in forms that fit established project structures, such as personal reflection or validation of decisions made elsewhere, while Peer Researchers are kept out of the parts of the process where concepts are defined, assumptions challenged, and interpretations negotiated. Concerns about vulnerability or readiness may steer them away from work deemed too sensitive or technical, narrowing their roles and preserving existing distributions of authority. The authors argue that clearer differentiation between forms of expertise can strengthen collaboration: statistical modelling, trial design, data governance, qualitative interpretation, experiential understanding, and ethical judgement each involve distinct competences, and technical skill in one domain does not confer exclusive authority over the framing, interpretation, or lived relevance of research. Practical steps include agreeing decision-making processes at the outset, creating routes for disagreement, documenting how lived experience input influenced the project, and being transparent when a decision cannot be shared for legal or governance reasons. The clearest marker of genuine collaboration, they suggest, is whether lived experience input can change the work itself.

Training and career development compound these problems. Many Peer Researchers remain employed on fixed-term or consultancy arrangements tied to individual studies, limiting opportunities to develop sustained expertise or academic careers. Training within projects may focus narrowly on enabling contributors to support pre-existing designs, while researchers without lived experience receive little preparation in the relational and ethical demands of co-production. The authors call for reciprocal but not symmetrical development: Peer Researchers gaining access to methodological and institutional knowledge, and established researchers developing skills in accessibility, power-sharing, and epistemic reflexivity. Sustainable roles require clear employment structures, fair compensation, appropriate authorship, and progression routes into substantive posts, fellowships, and leadership—while recognising that some Peer Researchers may prefer portfolio or community-based forms of work.

Underlying all of this is the structural context: eating disorder research is a comparatively small and under-resourced field, with investment disproportionately low relative to disease burden and mortality. Short project cycles and competitive grant processes mean Peer Researchers are often involved only after funding is secured and key decisions have been made, creating a genuine ethical dilemma for researchers who would otherwise involve them earlier. The authors propose structural solutions including pre-award involvement funds, institutional seed funding, and funding mechanisms that allow project designs to evolve throughout the lifecycle. They also examine how ethics and governance frameworks, developed primarily for research participants, may be misapplied to Peer Researchers in ways that overemphasise vulnerability, and how payment delays, benefit restrictions, and insecure contracts directly shape who can afford to contribute. Responsibility for change, they conclude, is shared across research teams, institutions, funders, ethics bodies, and the wider field—not individuals alone.

The commentary’s synthesising argument is that meaningful Peer Research depends not simply on the presence of people with lived experience within research teams, but on the conditions under which their expertise enters, influences, and is sustained within research. Differences in training and formal responsibility will remain, but ethical collaboration requires that these differences do not become a general hierarchy through which experiential knowledge is routinely subordinated. The possibility of distress or fluctuating health, the authors insist, should prompt responsive support and flexibility rather than exclusion as the default response. If the field can deliver broader recruitment, paid involvement during project development, reciprocal training, sustainable career pathways, proportionate governance, and transparent reporting of how lived experience has changed the work, Peer Researchers could move from being rhetorically welcomed to genuinely consequential contributors—with corresponding gains in the quality, relevance, and ethical integrity of eating disorder research itself.

Subject of Research: The role and integration of Peer Researchers with lived experience in eating disorder research

Article Title: Reflections on the role of Peer Researchers in eating disorders: identifying challenges, best practices, and future directions

Article References: Downs, J., Maloney, E., Carnegie, A., Thomas, K. S., & Chapman, L. (2026). Reflections on the role of Peer Researchers in eating disorders: identifying challenges, best practices, and future directions. Journal of Eating Disorders, 14(1), Article 238. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01757-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01757-w

Keywords: eating disorders, peer research, lived experience, co-production, epistemic justice, participatory research, research ethics, trauma-informed practice, power-sharing, mental health research, research funding, stigma

The study tackles a long-standing puzzle in public administration. Decades of scholarship have established that managerial quality matters for government performance, and that chief executives with greater public sector experience tend to preside over more effective organizations. Yet the evidence is inconsistent: some studies find strong effects of leaders’ backgrounds, others find none. The authors argue that much of this inconsistency stems from a neglect of context. Most research on the management-performance relationship has been conducted within a single country, treating the surrounding political environment as background noise rather than as a variable that can strengthen or weaken the link between a leader’s skills and measurable outcomes.

To build their theory, the researchers draw on the classic distinction, developed by the political scientist Arend Lijphart, between majoritarian and consociational models of democracy. In majoritarian systems, two main political blocs compete under a winner-takes-all logic, and the losing side serves as a watchful opposition expecting to alternate in power. This adversarial arrangement, the authors contend, creates powerful incentives for executives to perform well, because citizens can more easily identify and reward or punish the party responsible for policy outcomes. Party leaders, in turn, reward politicians whose performance enhances the party’s reputation, promoting their careers within disciplined, hierarchical organizations.

Consociational or power-sharing systems work very differently. Broad coalitions bring most significant parties into government, blurring the line between administration and opposition. Party leaders have incentives to bargain and collaborate with rivals rather than defeat them, and accountability becomes diffuse: when everyone shares credit, no one can be clearly blamed. The authors point to additional mechanisms that erode performance incentives in such systems, including frequent party switching, coalition-driven rotation of government posts, and the dilution of clear policy platforms through compromise. In these circumstances, a politician’s accumulated experience may simply not matter very much, because the electoral arena is not perceived as a zero-sum contest in which superior management translates into political advantage.

Testing this argument required a comparison of two countries that are alike in many respects but differ sharply in their patterns of political competition. Mexico and Colombia both have presidential systems with separation of powers, both underwent decentralization in the 1980s and 1990s, and both assign their intermediate-level governments, 32 Mexican states and 32 Colombian departments, major responsibility for education and health services. Yet their party systems diverged dramatically. Until 2018, Mexico operated a disciplined three-party system in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the conservative National Action Party, and the Party of the Democratic Revolution competed adversarially, with rare party switching and strong party loyalty at the state level.

Colombia, by contrast, carries a deep tradition of power sharing. Between 1958 and 1974, the Liberal and Conservative parties governed together under the National Front pact, alternating in the presidency and splitting cabinet posts evenly, an arrangement designed to end political violence. Even after fully competitive elections resumed, winning politicians continued offering co-governing roles to the losing side. The 1991 constitution opened the field to new parties, more than twenty of which now hold Senate seats, but coalition-building norms persisted. The authors illustrate the pattern with the department of Cundinamarca, where a defeated 2007 gubernatorial candidate supported the victor’s government and then won the 2011 election at the head of a coalition that included the very parties that had beaten him four years earlier.

Quantitative evidence reinforces this contrast. The authors calculated the effective number of parties in subnational elections between 1998 and 2015. Gubernatorial races looked similar in both countries, averaging roughly 2.4 effective candidacies. But assembly elections told a different story: Mexico averaged 2.64 effective parties, close to its gubernatorial figure and reflecting high party discipline, while Colombia averaged 5.43, more than double its gubernatorial figure. Colombian governors, in other words, must assemble sprawling, informal coalitions to govern, while Mexican governors could rely on cohesive partisan majorities.

The empirical analysis used two-way fixed-effects regression models on panel data covering the 32 Mexican states from 1995 to 2010 and the 32 Colombian departments from 2001 to 2015, spanning multiple gubernatorial administrations in each country. Performance was measured with two indicators managed primarily at the intermediate level: high school enrollment rates as an output of education policy, and infant mortality rates, deaths in the first year of life per 1,000 live births, as an outcome of health policy. The researchers hand-collected biographical data on every governor, classifying years of public sector experience at the local, state or departmental, and national levels. Mexican governors averaged 14.2 years of public experience, concentrated in national and state posts, while Colombian governors averaged 9.6 years, distributed more evenly across levels. The models controlled for partisan alignment with national and subnational legislatures, party affiliation, margin of victory, postgraduate education, revenue per capita, rural population density, and violence, proxied by homicide rates in Mexico and internally displaced populations in Colombia.

The results split cleanly along the adversarialism divide. In Mexican states, governors’ prior experience in local and state government significantly reduced infant mortality, with each additional year of local or state experience lowering infant deaths, while each additional year of federal-level experience was associated with worse outcomes. Partisan alignment with the health minister also improved health performance. In Colombian departments, by contrast, none of the experience measures showed a significant relationship with either infant mortality or high school enrollment, and a power analysis confirmed that this null result was not an artifact of sample size. Joint models pooling both countries confirmed the pattern: the effect of state-level experience on infant mortality differed significantly between the two systems, negative in Mexico but not in Colombia. Education enrollment showed weaker effects overall, suggesting that the experience-performance link is strongest for outcomes, like infant survival, that depend heavily on executive coordination of health services.

The authors are careful to note that their findings do not constitute a normative endorsement of adversarial politics over power sharing. Adversarial systems may extract more value from experienced executives, but they also expose governments to stronger opposition and a more turbulent external environment. The practical implications cut both ways. In adversarial systems, candidate recruitment should prioritize managerial and technical skills that translate directly into performance, while power-sharing systems may benefit more from executives skilled in coalition building and networking. And where opposition parties are co-opted rather than competitive, accountability may need to come from civil society and the media instead. More broadly, the study delivers a methodological message to the field: theories of public management built in one country, however elegant, cannot be assumed to travel. What works in Mexico may not work in Colombia, and the difference is not culture or capacity but the structure of political competition itself, a variable that shapes whether a leader’s hard-won experience ever gets the chance to matter.

Subject of Research: The moderating effect of political competition on the relationship between executives' experience and subnational government performance in Mexico and Colombia

Article Title: Adversarialism and power-sharing: the effect of political competition on the management-performance relationship

Article References: Bello-Gomez, R. A., Avellaneda, C. N., & Olvera, J. G. (2024). Adversarialism and power-sharing: the effect of political competition on the management-performance relationship. Global Public Policy and Governance, 4(4), 389-419. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-024-00104-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-024-00104-6

Keywords: political competition, government performance, public management, adversarialism, power-sharing, governors, Mexico, Colombia, subnational governments, infant mortality, education enrollment, comparative public administration

The study, led by Andrew Harding and Reuben Tete Larbi of Lancaster University’s Division of Health Research, together with colleagues from Blackpool Council and the University of Liverpool, was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research through its Health Determinants Research Collaboration award. Rather than asking simply whether co-production works, the team used a realist approach, which asks a more nuanced set of questions: what works, for whom, how, and in what circumstances. Realist synthesis treats programmes as theories embedded in real-world systems, and its goal is to uncover the hidden causal pathways, the context-mechanism-outcome configurations, that explain why the same initiative can succeed in one place and disappoint in another.

The researchers began with scoping searches to identify key literature on co-production in local authority settings, drawing on five major databases: Scopus, CINAHL, Academic Search Ultimate, Web of Science and SocINDEX. From this body of work they constructed initial programme theories, which they expressed as context-mechanism-outcome configurations written in the form of if-then-because statements. These statements capture the logic of intervention: if certain conditions hold, then a particular outcome follows, because a specific mechanism is triggered. The configurations were organised under four themes: equity and inclusion, collaboration and systems change, ethical and sustainable engagement, and measurement and evaluation.

The analytical core of the study rested on 25 sources, but the team did not stop at the literature. In a deliberate effort to ground the synthesis in reality, they refined their theories through two workshops involving six participants with lived experience of local authority services and four local authority officers. Analysis was thematic, retroductive and iterative, meaning the researchers moved back and forth between the published evidence, their own theoretical framework and the insights of workshop participants, testing and refining each proposed pathway until it survived critical scrutiny. This design reflects a core principle of the research itself: that people who use services should help generate the knowledge about how those services are improved.

The synthesis produced nine context-mechanism-outcome configurations and an overarching programme theory, and its central finding is strikingly clear: trust is the engine of co-production. Trust emerged as the pivotal mechanism for engagement, but the researchers showed that it is not built through goodwill alone. It grows from culturally competent practice, genuinely inclusive processes and deliberate power-sharing arrangements that signal to participants that their contributions carry real weight. Where marginalized communities face complicated rules, past negative experiences or services that feel alien to their culture and needs, involvement is unlikely. But when co-production makes services feel more respectful, inclusive and human, people develop a sense of warmth, belonging and confidence, and they become willing to stay engaged, speak up and help shape services that work for everyone.

The study also articulated its dark twin, a rival theory that will resonate with anyone who has sat through a poorly run consultation. When organisations invite communities in without real commitment, when leaders withhold support, when staff lack facilitation skills or when old hierarchies quietly reassert themselves, participation becomes tokenistic. Participants recognise the tick-box exercise for what it is, trust in services falls, people withdraw, and services remain out of touch with the communities they are meant to serve. The researchers emphasise that this failure mode is not a marginal risk but a common trajectory, and that avoiding it requires structural change rather than better marketing of involvement exercises.

Three further clusters of findings flesh out the conditions for authentic collaboration. Sustainable co-production, the synthesis found, depends on visible leadership commitment, long-term investment and genuine opportunities for skill development and emotional support for participants. Ethical integrity and trauma-informed facilitation proved essential for creating safe spaces in which people felt respected and brave enough to share their vulnerability, a point that matters enormously when services touch on sensitive areas such as housing, social care and family support. Cross-sector collaboration and systems thinking, meanwhile, enabled shared purpose and accountability across organisational boundaries, allowing councils, health services and community organisations to act as a coherent whole rather than a patchwork of competing priorities.

Evaluation emerged as a final, often neglected pillar. The researchers found that participatory and creative approaches to evaluation do more than measure impact; they actively strengthen trust, demonstrate to participants that their input made a difference, and promote continuous learning within the organisation. Concepts such as trust, power-sharing and leadership commitment, the authors note, operated recursively across different contexts and at varying system levels, meaning that the same mechanisms that launch a co-production project must be continuously renewed to sustain it. This recursive quality helps explain why one-off involvement initiatives so often fade: the mechanisms that spark engagement are treated as launch requirements rather than ongoing obligations.

The conclusions carry practical weight for local authorities under pressure to involve communities in decisions about health determinants and public services. Authentic co-production, the study argues, depends on aligning relational trust, ethical practice and structural support within learning cultures that genuinely value lived experience. That alignment is not achieved through a single intervention but through the everyday culture and governance of the organisation, from how meetings are facilitated to how budgets are committed and how results are fed back to participants. The synthesis advances theoretical understanding of co-production as a complex system phenomenon, but it also offers a practical checklist for officers and councillors: build trust through inclusive, culturally competent practice; share power visibly; invest for the long term; support participants emotionally and skilfully; facilitate with trauma-informed care; collaborate across sectors with shared accountability; and evaluate creatively and participatorily.

For a field often criticised for producing enthusiasm without evidence, this realist synthesis provides something rare: a theoretically grounded, empirically tested account of the causal machinery beneath co-production. Its message is ultimately hopeful. When local authorities get the conditions right, people who have been marginalised by services become their most valuable designers, and the resulting services are more equitable, more trusted and more effective. When they get the conditions wrong, involvement becomes theatre, and cynicism deepens. The difference, this research shows, lies not in the idea of co-production itself but in the trust, ethics and structural commitment that surround it.

Subject of Research: Realist synthesis of how co-production of local authority services works, for whom and under what circumstances

Article Title: Realist synthesis of co-production of services in a local authority context: what works, for whom, how and in what circumstances?

Article References: Harding, A., Larbi, R. T., Lowndes, A., Marshall, P., Mars, A., Goodridge, M., & Wigglesworth, P. (2026). Realist synthesis of co-production of services in a local authority context: what works, for whom, how and in what circumstances?. Health Research Policy and Systems. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-026-01522-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12961-026-01522-0

Keywords: co-production, local authority, realist synthesis, public services, trust, power-sharing, community engagement, health determinants, participatory evaluation, systems change, lived experience, trauma-informed facilitation