Exploring Elinor Ostrom's principles for collaborative group working within a user-led project: lessons from a collaboration between researchers and a user-led organisation.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Some research has been undertaken into the mechanisms that shape successful participatory approaches in the context of efforts to improve health and social care. However, greater attention needs to be directed to how partnerships between researchers and user-led organisations (ULOs) might best be formed, practiced, managed, and assessed. We explored whether political economist Elinor Ostrom's Nobel prize winning analysis of common pool resource management-specifically eight principles to enhance collaborative group working as derived from her empirical research-could be usefully applied within a user-led project aiming to co-design new services to support more inclusive involvement of Disabled people in decision-making processes in policy and practice. METHODS: Participant observation and participatory methods over a 16-month period comprising observational notes of online user-led meetings (26 h), online study team meetings (20 h), online Joint Interpretive Forum meetings (8 h), and semi-structured one-to-one interviews with project participants (44 h) at two time points (months 6 and 10). RESULTS: Initially it proved difficult to establish working practices informed by Ostrom's principles for collaborative group working within the user-led project. Several attempts were made to put a structure in place that met the needs of both the research study and the aims of the user-led project, but this was not straightforward. An important shift saw a move away from directly applying the principles to the working practices of the group and instead applying them to specific tasks the group were undertaking. This was a helpful realisation which enabled the principles to become-for most but not all participants-a useful facilitation device in the latter stages of the project. Eventually we applied the principles in a way that was useful and enabled collaboration between researchers and a ULO (albeit in unexpected ways). CONCLUSIONS: Our joint reflections emphasise the importance of being reflexive and responsive when seeking to apply theories of collaboration (the principles) within user-led work. At an early stage, it is important to agree shared definitions and understanding of what 'user-led' means in practice. It is crucial to actively adapt and translate the principles in ways that make them more accessible and applicable within groups where prior knowledge of their origins is both unlikely and unnecessary.

Academic researchers and members of Shaping Our Lives­a national network and user-led organisation of Disabled people and service users­came together to explore whether Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize winning work on collaborative group working could usefully inform efforts to co-design new services to promote the inclusive involvement of Disabled people in decision-making processes. We wanted to see if Ostrom's 'principles for collaborative group working' were relevant to and could perhaps facilitate a co-design process led by a user led organisation. At first, we struggled to decide how Ostrom's principles might inform the user-led project. We tried different ways to achieve this and eventually found an approach that most but not all of us found helpful. An important change we made was to stop focusing on how the members of the user-led group were collaborating together and instead to apply the principles to specific aspects of the co-design project that were complex and could be responded to in multiple ways. By the end of the 16-month study we had found a way of using the principles to better enable collaboration between academic researchers and a user-led organisation (although not in the way we had initially anticipated). We learned how Ostrom's principles could be used to facilitate discussion of aspects of project work that are complex and the pros and cons of different plans of action. This project has demonstrated that collaboration between researchers and user-led organisations can be challenging but also has great potential for shared learning.