Introduction

In this book we have explored and developed the idea of a community development approach to the co-production of research. This approach emerged during the five years of Imagine – Connecting communities through research. Many communities are excluded from decision-making processes and are marginalised in relation to civic engagement and community participation. The Imagine project tried to imagine better communities and make them happen, but with a difference. We tried to do this together as a partnership between people based largely in universities and those based mainly in non-academic communities of place, interest and identity. This enabled the emergence of discussions about what this meant when academics in universities and a variety of people outside of them worked together. Everyone accepted that ‘community’ was difficult to define, but mostly we felt that the term symbolised a desire to live and work together for mutual benefit, rather than for the enrichment or accumulation of power by a few in society. Hence, community development, as a value-based process, which aims to address imbalances in power and bring about change founded on social justice, equality and inclusion, came to the fore as a way of understanding questions of civic engagement – people's participation in the communities in which they live. The notion of community development also implied the importance of not just seeing co-productive research as a quick process. The importance of developing longer-term relationships and legacies were issues we knew were important (Northmore and Hart, 2011).

Challenges and rewards of co-production

We have tried to bring to life in this book that the co-production of research, which brings experiential knowledge of people outside universities to the surface, enables them to create new knowledge that can lead to positive change in their communities. We consider that co-production can therefore give purpose to social sciences and arts and humanities research undertaken in universities. This might suggest that our book celebrates the co-production of research as unproblematic and exemplary. We hope it has not done that. As the reader should see from the chapters in this book, we have also tried to explain the difficulties we faced. We hope we have managed to convey something of the limitations and criticisms of co-production as an approach to research.