SOAS Professor Naomi Hossain reflects on the deep personal meaning of ‘research impact’ and the dissonance that arises from conventional efforts to measure it. She argues that real world events have made it both more difficult and dangerous to achieve and measure impact in many areas of international development, including hers, but that the deep personal links of scholars means they keep going, rather than choose ‘easier’ research areas.

For a decade, I had one driving goal on my personal research agenda: to get young Bangladeshis, talking, thinking and reading about the Bangladesh famine of 1974. Then, earlier this year, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank and leader of Bangladesh’s current interim government, spoke about the famine at a high-level investment event. With tears in his eyes and in his voice, Muhammad Yunus recalled the horrors he had seen and how they spurred him to create his famous micro-credit model. He spoke about how far the country had come since, about its resilience, about how Bangladesh had learned from disasters. He cited mortality figures I had cited in my book about the famine; this had finally been published in Bangladesh, and his Press Secretary had read and posted about it. People are talking publicly about the famine for the first time in 50 years, and my research helped start that conversation.

So I should be feeling positive about my research ‘impact’. But the opposite is true: I am incredibly anxious about the pressing need to demonstrate that our research has impact beyond the world of ideas. With preparations for the Research Excellence (REF) Framework 2029 now underway, all researchers in British universities are thinking about how our work changes the world (or at least nudges it in new directions). And I am not only anxious about my research impact, but that of my entire field of development studies (or international development or global development). In a world where your demonstration of impact will partly determine how much money you get for research, it matters to us collectively if the field of development studies finds it increasingly hard to do research that demonstrates impact in a short timeframe. And it has become more complex and time-consuming and more personally and professionally dangerous to even attempt such research over the past decade, for several reasons:

1. Closing civic space: researchers working in the global South have for years sounded the alarm that it has become dangerous to undertake independent research if that research does not actively support the agendas of those in power. Research for ACT Alliance as far back as 2019 noted that shrinking civic space was already having a chilling effect on research. Scholars have been killed or disappeared for doing unwelcome research, or criminalized for their evidence-based advocacy.
2. The dangers of working with independent civic actors: the least bad option may be to work with civil society groups, to support their efforts to hold their state accountable or support the delivery of services that do not threaten those in power. But then you must weigh up the effects of your research activity on your partners: if your collaborative research is overly critical or independent, will that expose them to backlash or scrutiny?
3. The risks of engaging with undemocratic governments: democracy is on the decline globally, so if you want your research to inform public policy, you increasingly need to engage with governments that are antidemocratic or even violently authoritarian. So if, for instance, your research helps to improve the responsiveness of the healthcare system, you may also be helping anti-democratic forces sustain their power. And if, as we saw in Bangladesh in the last year, the authoritarians are overthrown, you risk being tarred as a collaborator for trying to do your job. Rocks and hard places everywhere.
4. Value for money: even before Britain cut its aid budget to buy more weapons, research funding for global development was under pressure. The overriding emphasis on value-for-money in public spending meant that research that had little chance of making a real-world impact in the short term had become low priority. Why propose research into problems you have no chance of addressing?

All of this might help explain why only one of the REF 2021 impact cases in development studies claimed to have had ‘political’ impact: it is too difficult and too dangerous.

RIP the politics of development.

So why don’t development studies scholars just go and study something less contentious, somewhere less dangerous? I was thinking about this during our recent Equitable Research Impact workshops at SOAS, facilitated by development research gurus Duncan Green and Peter Evans.

In principle it may be possible for researchers to change tack, to look around the world and decide that they can do impactful research on some entirely new area in some other part of the world. But many of us at SOAS, and many of us in the field of development studies more generally, cannot just pivot to topics where we might have more impact. We all bring our biographies to the research we do, and that shapes what we do and how we do it, and with whom. At SOAS, more than most other universities, we have deep personal, political, educational, economic and national links to the research we do. The desire to have impact – the way we seek to change the world with our research – therefore carries with it a rich but also heavy load that lies outside the realms of conventional research impact.

My own impact ‘success’ was a long, tortuous, and unlikely story. Bangladeshi publishers were scared to publish my book about the famine because the famine was too ‘sensitive’ for the authoritarian Awami League regime to discuss. Efforts to put the topic on the public agenda were quashed. I had just about given up when the government was toppled by a student-people movement. It was the most unexpected opening that made it possible to get young Bangladeshis talking about the famine. I will forever feel proud of that ‘impact’. But the REF? My story doesn’t fit the timeframe; this impact could never have been planned. We need to recognize that research impact is far harder in development studies than the neat little impact case studies suggest. Research impact is for life, not just for REF.