Summary

Funders around the world increasingly expect the research they support to make a difference – to inform policy, improve practice, and address complex societal challenges. But how exactly does research travel from publication to use to impact? And what can funders do to support that journey?

In partnership with the Impact Funders Forum, this project will build a clearer evidence base about the relationship between research use and positive impact. Rather than treating “impact” as an endpoint, we focus on the relational pathways  – the who, how and why – that connect research production to real-world outcomes.

By combining evidence synthesis with in-depth case studies of funder practice, PATHWAYS will generate practical, evidence-informed guidance to help funders design policies and programmes that genuinely enhance the chances of research being used, while catalysing a broader global agenda for research engagement and impact.

Project team

Kathryn Graham, Project co-lead, University of Calgary 
Helen Buckley Woods, Project co-lead, RoRI/UCL
Ben Miyamoto, Project manager, Impact Funders Forum
Alison Bourgon, Working Group co-chair,  CIHR
Molly Morgan Jones, Working Group co-chair, The British Academy

Partner organisations

• The British Academy (BA)
• Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR)
• Impact Funders Forum
• Health Research BC
• UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
• Volkswagen Foundation

The project in detail

RoRI and the Impact Funders Forum will collaborate on this project to synthesise what is known about impact-oriented research use, and to study how funders can develop and adapt policies, strategies and funding practices to foster and incentivise research use that can lead to positive impact across their research funding lifecycle. 

This project will contribute new knowledge to increase understanding of how research use occurs and who is engaged, how and why, and how research use is assessed in its relationship to research impact. We will highlight the interaction of various funding policies, strategies and practices that improve the way research is used so that it leads to impact. 

Overall research question: “What are the underlying conditions, success factors and relational pathways for advancing research use to enhance positive impact?”

We will focus on the relational pathways (the who, how and why of the path between research use and impact) as the “thing” or “intervention” that links the process of research production to research use to impact across the research and funding lifecycle. 

The project consists of two phases of activity that will take place concurrently. 

Objectives: 

1. Understand how the process of research use and its relationship to any resulting research impact is conceptualised, defined, assessed and measured.
2. Understand funder policies, strategies and practices to incentivise research use and enhance research impact focusing on the ‘who, how and why’ of the path between research use and research impact. 

Discovery workshop: At the outset of the project we will hold an in-person workshop conducted over 1–2 days to bring together project partners and other relevant stakeholders to ensure a shared understanding of the research objectives, conceptual underpinnings, and priorities. The outcomes of this workshop will support the formulation of the evidence synthesis and the case studies.

Phase 1: Evidence synthesis

Efforts to evaluate and enhance research impact are often constrained by conceptual ambiguity. Terms such as research use and impact and other interrelated and contingent concepts like, relational pathways, and co-produced pathways, are invoked frequently yet inconsistently defined across disciplines and jurisdictions. This lack of clarity undermines attempts to design robust research impact strategies and assessments to compare findings and inform policy decisions. Phase 1 addresses these challenges by conducting a synthesis of existing reviews, definitions, and conceptual frameworks and identifying success factors and conditions that enable research use to translate to positive impact as well as gaps in knowledge.

Phase 1 is guided by two research questions:

1. How are research use and research impact defined, conceptualised, and measured?
   
2. What conditions and factors enable research use processes to translate into positive impact, including the role of relational pathways? 

Methodological approach: Recognising that there are numerous reviews on research impact, our aim is to supplement rather than duplicate more extended reviews. This project is interested in the relationship between research use and positive impact: the pathways that link the who and how of research use with the what of impact. We anticipate that findings will inform gaps and how success is defined and measured.

Phase 2: Realist informed case study

In this Phase we will unpack how funders’ policies, strategies and practices influence impact-oriented research use using a realist-informed case study design, focusing on relational pathways (Causal Pathways, 2023; Moore & Khan, 2025,) between funder actions, the conditions created for researchers and other actors, the mechanisms by which research outputs are disseminated and used, and the outcomes/impacts that follow. The intent is to distinguish common pathways that appear across funders from those that are context-specific and then use these insights to co-create a research agenda for next steps. 

Phase 2 is guided by the research question: Examine the role of funders – their policies, strategies, and practices—in shaping and incentivising engaged research use aimed at impact across diverse contexts. 

Specific objectives of Phase 2: (1) Identify existing and possible funder policies, strategies and practices to incent research use for impact; (2) Articulate relational pathways between and among those policies, strategies and practices, the conditions they create, the mechanisms that are triggered, and the resulting use and impact; (3) Identify which relational pathways are common across funders and pathways to impact and which are unique to specific contexts; and (4) Convene an emergent findings workshop to discuss insights, issues for consideration and proposed enhancements, and cocreate a research agenda for next steps.

Phase 2 will include two iterative activities:

Realist informed case study: Following the Discovery Workshop (see above), we will conduct a multiple case study (Yin, 2009) to understand relational pathways between funder practices, the conditions they create for researchers, the mechanisms by which outputs are disseminated and used, and the resulting impacts. Case studies will be used to bound context and enable comparison within and across cases.

Theory iteration workshop: Once refined candidate theories of change have been identified from the case study, we will convene a second in-person workshop to present findings to partners and interest holders and to begin validating or invalidating them as useful for funder policies, strategies and practices. The workshop will also surface innovative practices that may not have appeared in the analysis. The candidate theories will be further iterated and refined based on feedback. 

Project timeline

The project began in January 2026 and will conclude in June 2027. Phase one (evidence synthesis) and Phase two (case studies) will run concurrently. 

Outputs

• Actionable resources (e.g., policy briefs) summarising key aspects of research use pathways—aimed at policymaker audiences with a focus on how to integrate research use into their practice. 
• Funding guides summarising key aspects of the role that funders have played/can play in supporting pathways to research use – aimed at funder audiences with a key focus on how to fund and design interventions to achieve maximum impact. 
• Evidence synthesis (published as a RoRI Working Paper) about definitions, state of knowledge, and knowledge gaps on the research use and impact link.
• A RoRI scoping and workshop report resulting from the emergent findings workshop with funders and partners.
• A RoRI Working Paper and webinar to interest-holders containing evidence-informed theories of change of how funder policies, strategies and practices (i.e., funder “interventions” in the design and management in their funding programs) lead to research use and impact, and what works, for who and in what contexts.
• One to three manuscripts prepared for publication in academic journals presenting: the theories of change, the evidence synthesis, and the realist-informed multi-case study. Also, two possible additional articles, one presenting the results of the co-created research agenda, and one thought-leadership manuscript about the systematic co-creation process of developing the research agenda.  
• A RoRI Working Paper on the findings of the cases and webinar presenting a co-created research agenda for testing evidence-informed practices in funding operations across different contexts.
• Possible related conference submissions for the 2027 International Conference for Realist Research and 2027 Metascience Conference in Montreal.