One of the most strategically interesting developments I’ve encountered this year, through my work across research culture and research-enabling systems, is not a new framework, concordat, or strategy document, but the National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange (NCACE) Research Associates pilot.
On the surface, the scheme is modest: light-touch institutional support, a small honorarium, access to resources, and space to contribute reflective, applied work. But from a policy and funding perspective, it is doing something far more consequential. It treats recognition and career support as infrastructure, not reward and that distinction has significant implications for how research careers are funded, governed, and sustained.
THE CORE PROBLEM
Research career support systems remain largely designed around assumptions that no longer reflect how collaborative research actually happens:
- institutional employment as the primary site of research activity
- linear career progression
- stable disciplinary identities
- conventional outputs as proxies for contribution and impact
At the same time, a growing proportion of the work that sustains research ecosystems now takes place outside formal institutional roles and employment structures, even when it remains institutionally governed, funded, or legitimised. This includes work that occurs:
- across sectors (academia, culture, community, policy)
- through freelance, portfolio, and independent practice
- via relational, connective, interpretive, and cultural labour
- in applied contexts where knowledge is mobilised rather than simply produced
This work is widely relied upon, particularly in knowledge exchange, impact delivery, collaboration, inclusion, and partnership building, yet it remains structurally under-recognised and under-supported.
The result is a system that depends on these forms of labour while systematically failing to resource, stabilise, or retain the people who perform them.
The issue is not a lack of talent or commitment. It is a failure of career infrastructure to keep pace with lived research practice.
POSTIONAL GROUNDING
This analysis is informed by a practitioner–researcher trajectory that spans socially engaged, community-based arts practice, participatory action research, independently commissioned qualitative research, and professional services roles embedded within research-intensive institutional environments.
My research expertise has developed through sustained work across academic, cultural, and community settings, as well as in research-adjacent professional services roles where the practical conditions for research, ethics, governance, partnership building, researcher development, and delivery infrastructure, are made to function.
Working in these enabling roles makes visible a form of labour that is essential to research systems but rarely recognised as knowledge work: relational coordination, interpretive judgement, translation between stakeholders, synthesis across diverse forms of evidence and perspective, and informal leadership without formal authority. These capacities are routinely relied upon to sustain collaboration, impact delivery, and inclusive practice, yet are often categorised as “support” rather than strategic expertise.
This vantage point provides direct insight into how research systems function in practice. This combined perspective reveals a persistent misalignment between how research is formally recognised and how it is actually sustained in practice. It is from this vantage point, bridging community-embedded inquiry, academic research cultures, and research-enabling infrastructure, that the NCACE Research Associates pilot appears not marginal, but structurally prescient.
RECOGNITION REFRAMED AS INFRASTRUSTURE
Recognition is often treated as:
- a symbolic reward
- an end-of-process acknowledgement
- a discretionary cultural gesture
In practice, recognition functions as core system infrastructure. In this sense, recognition operates as a governance mechanism: shaping behaviour and allocating legitimacy. It determines:
- who is seen as credible
- whose labour is resourced or rendered invisible
- who absorbs institutional risk
- and which forms of work are reproduced over time
When recognition systems are misaligned with reality, research ecosystems become dependent on:
- invisible labour
- unpaid relational and coordination work
- informal leadership without authority
- individuals buffering systemic failure at personal cost
In many research systems, fixed-term contracts have come to operate as a casualised cousin of recognition infrastructure. They temporarily stabilise individuals whose labour is essential to research functioning, without addressing the underlying mismatch between contribution and support. In doing so, they shift systemic risk onto individuals while leaving the structure itself unchanged.
From a policy and funding perspective, this is inefficient, inequitable, and unsustainable. It undermines return on investment, accelerates attrition, and weakens system resilience.
WHAT NCACE DOES DIFFERENTLY
The NCACE Research Associates pilot should be understood as a policy prototype, not a peripheral initiative.
Rather than attempting to retrofit independent researchers into employment-based models, it starts from how collaborative research work is actually organised today. Specifically, it:
- recognises independent and freelance researchers as legitimate knowledge producers, rather than marginal or exceptional actors
- decouples recognition from employment status, enabling contribution to be supported without forcing re-institutionalisation or precarious affiliation
- provides proportionate, light-touch institutional support, increasing stability and legitimacy while minimising administrative burden
- values meaningful, right-sized contribution, resisting output inflation and performative productivity
- embeds career support within a community of practice, strengthening peer learning and knowledge circulation rather than competitive progression
Taken together, this model delivers high systemic value at relatively low cost, while avoiding the risks of large-scale structural reform, a combination funders should take seriously.
This is not an argument against flexible or independent modes of contribution, which are often highly effective, but for ensuring that recognition and support systems are designed to sustain the people who do this work.
ADDRESSING THE "NICHE" OBJECTION
Independent researchers may appear numerically marginal. The forms of labour this pilot recognises are not. They are widely distributed across research systems, carried by academics, arts and cultural practitioners, and community-based researchers working across institutional and sectoral boundaries.
Relational coordination, boundary-crossing, informal leadership, partnership maintenance, and interpretive work are widely distributed across research systems, carried by academics, professional services staff, research developers, project managers, technicians, and early-career researchers alike.
What is niche is not the work itself, but the visibility and recognition of it.
This makes the problem structural rather than exceptional: not one of scale, but of misclassification, a classic policy blind spot.
IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY AND FUNDING
If cross-sector, portfolio, and applied research practice continues to expand, as current evidence suggests, recognition and career support systems will need to evolve accordingly. These implications are not rhetorical. They point to concrete design choices in funding, governance, and workforce strategy.
Key implications include:
- Funding design: increased attention to sustaining people and practices, not only projects and outputs
- Impact strategy: explicit recognition of relational and connective labour as central to impact delivery
- Equity and inclusion: reduced reliance on unpaid, informal, or discretionary recognition
- Risk management: improved retention of experienced practitioners and cultural leaders
- System resilience: better alignment between funding mechanisms and lived research practice
The NCACE Research Associates pilot offers a concrete, replicable example of how this evolution might begin.
CONCLUSION
For individual participants, this model may feel like a moment of alignment or rightness of fit. For the system, its significance lies elsewhere. It represents a shift from asking “How do people fit existing structures?” to asking “How should structures change to reflect how research actually happens now?”
That shift is essential if research policy is to remain credible, effective, and sustainable.
Treating recognition as infrastructure requires the same level of intentional design, evidence, and investment that we apply to other critical research systems.
Recognition, when designed as infrastructure, is not a reward. It is a condition of system health.
The NCACE Research Associates pilot deserves attention not as an exception, but as a principle worth scaling.
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