Abstract
This article describes and critically reflects on the backstage processes of MaN’Aige, a co-creative research project conducted in two inner-city neighbourhoods in Brussels. The project aimed to explore how caring neighbourhoods can be built between residents and diverse local users such as commuters, institutions, and businesses, through co-creative research. Using a multi-method approach embedded in a series of Living Labs, the project combined walk-along interviews, mapping, creative workshops, and collective reflection to co-create knowledge and community-based actions. While co-creative research is often promoted as a tool for social transformation, its implementation yielded significant tensions and contradictions. Drawing on our experiences as academic researchers involved in the project, we reflect on how the project’s ideals of participation and shared ownership were challenged by four key tensions: the gap between planned and actual trajectories; the absence of an explicit social justice lens; conceptual ambiguity around participatory research; and the limitations imposed by institutional structures. We argue that participatory and co-creative research must reclaim its political roots by actively confronting power imbalances and remain attentive to who participates and who benefits. Furthermore, co-creation entails a process of de-creation, challenging not only prevailing assumptions on academic research, but also funding and academic structures that shape and constrain these practices. Finally, we hope this article gives insights in the complexities of participatory research and contributes to fostering more equitable and supportive conditions for building genuine participatory research practices.
Introduction
Participatory research approaches have gained increasing attention in academia, embracing university-community partnerships. Different approaches exist with their own contextual and historical background, also emerging outside of academia. Exemplary are community-based participatory research (e.g. Israel et al., 1998), Participatory Action Research (e.g. Reason & Bradbury, 2008), transdisciplinary research (e.g. Brown et al., 2010), co-production (e.g. Turnhout et al., 2020), collaborative research (e.g. Metz et al., 2019), and more recently co-creative research (e.g. Nicholas et al., 2019). In this paper, we will focus on co-creative research, as it was the frame of the MaN’Aige project.
Models for Public Participation in Scientific Research (Adapted From Bonney et al., 2009, p. 19)
X = co-researchers included in research phase; (X) = co-researchers sometimes included in research phase.
Although sometimes considered as a distinctive research approach that wishes to push involvement and ownership further than other participatory approaches (Nicholas et al., 2019; Voorberg et al., 2015), co-creation is also criticised for romanticising participation and masking tensions (Phillips & Napan, 2016). The concept of co-creation has roots in business management, where it has often been employed in a market-driven perspective focusing on ‘innovation’ or ‘problem-solving’ (Metz et al., 2019). Co-creative research is then used instrumentally, merely focused on adding participants to a process in order to improve research outcomes or solutions, without putting light on the role of power and politics in these processes (Turnhout et al., 2020). Looking beyond the participation levels as proposed by Bonney et al., for us co-creative research shares foundational principles with other participatory research approaches (Kint et al., 2025): (1) the research aims to foster societal transformation, (2) people concerned need to be included, and (3) genuine shared ownership and power distribution are essential.
First, at the heart lies a strong commitment to societal transformation and social justice. Further than understanding, describing or observing social reality, research should aim to bring about social action and change (Beebeejaun et al., 2015), to enhance the agency of the people involved and their possibility to reconstruct reality and improve their situation. Research should depart from and include the voices of those who are often not heard or listened to and counter existing power imbalances (Freire, 1970; Reason & Bradbury, 2008). Participatory research often includes groups or people facing structural disadvantage or exclusion, for example, experiencing health disparities (e.g. Skewes et al., 2020), homelessness (e.g. Clover, 2011), or migration (e.g. Francisco-Menchavez & Tungohan, 2020).
Second, in participatory research approaches, people who are directly affected by the topic or have direct interests should be actively involved in all or some aspects of the research process (Lenette, 2022). Instead of a researcher-researched relationship, a group of co-researchers should be involved throughout the whole process. To be able to include people, as is often mentioned, building connections and trust are at the heart of participatory research practices. Although the aim is to include people, in practice, participation is not continuous. Co-creative research therefore requires a lot of time and trust to be able to create a common ground and a shared understandings (Sherriff et al., 2019).
Third, in participatory research approaches, people involved should have control and ownership over the process. This implies a power sharing, for example, on the level of decision-making or knowledge building. As Fals-Borda and Rahman (1991, p. 5) put it, “to participate means to break up voluntarily and through experience the asymmetrical relationship of submission and dependence implicit in the subject/object binomial. This is the essence of participation”.
The MaN’Aige project focused on the notion of caring neighbourhoods, a policy concept that refers to local environments in which residents, professionals, and organisations collectively contribute to care and mutual support in everyday life. Our project explored how such caring relationships could be strengthened across two neighbourhoods. By engaging with this concrete urban context, the project sought to translate the abstract ambitions of co-creation and participation into situated and relational research practices.
Building on these broader principles of co-creative research as described in the literature, this article focuses on how these ambitions unfolded in practice, in the backstage of the MaN’Aige project. Following the framing of the special issue, we use the term “backstage” to refer to the behind-the-scenes processes of our research, those relational, ethical, and organisational dynamics that are usually hidden from the frontstage of publications and presentations, yet crucially shape the research process. Specifically, our aim is twofold: (1) To provide an in-depth account of the practices we employed during the research, what we actually did, how we tried to realise the co-creative process in practice, how we failed, and how this differed from more conventional academic representations. (2) To critically reflect on these experiences and the tensions we faced while trying to find our way through the inherent messiness of co-creative research.
From the outset, our intention was not to reproduce an idealised image of co-creative research, but to explore how such ideals were negotiated, challenged and undermined in practice. By contrasting the aspirational frameworks as found in the literature with the messy and sometimes contradictory realities of implementation, we aim to shed light on the ‘backstage’ of our research.
Background: The MaN’Aige Project
Construction of Initial Questions
This paper draws upon the MaN’Aige project, a co-creative research project that aimed to build a caring neighbourhood in two mixed-use areas of inner-city Brussels. The idea of MaN'Aige emerged in 2017 from local service centre Het Anker in partnership with a neighbourhood community health centre, the nursing department of a university-college located in the neighbourhood, neighbourhood inhabitants and users, a knowledge centre on housing, care and wellbeing and our research department. The different partners were already involved in the topic of caring neighbourhoods, and relations pre-existed the project.
The aim to build a caring neighbourhood was part of a larger care policy movement that focuses on connections and social cohesion among neighbours, but also the relationship between residents and care providers to facilitate matching of demand and supply or fostering greater collaboration among local care services (De Donder et al., 2024). For MaN’Aige specifically, the initial aim when writing the proposal was based on three key observations the local service centre had made: (1) Access to the local service centre is challenging for care-dependent older residents due to significant physical barriers like arterial roads, stairs, and steep slopes related to the height difference between both neighbourhoods, (2) There is a lack of local services and facilities for older or care-dependent residents; (3) Both neighbourhoods are not merely residential, but home to numerous office spaces, cultural venues, educational institutions, shopping centres, local shops, and restaurants but also students, commuters, and passersby, which were grouped under the term “neighbourhood users”. While many caring neighbourhood projects that have been developed since 2010 focus on neighbourhood residents and local care actors, and some projects involve local non-care professionals such as postal workers, shopkeepers, cashiers or hairdressers in care networks (Duppen et al., 2019), other types of neighbourhood users such as theatres, museums, large companies and organisations, as well as individual workers, students and commuters, are rarely involved. Because they are widely present in diverse and highly urbanised contexts and may have a meaningful role to play, the aim of MaN’Aige was therefore to explore the potential role of neighbourhood users in a caring neighbourhood. MaN’Aige departed from the question of how to build a caring neighbourhood together with neighbourhood residents and these users.
Project Governance and Participants
MaN’Aige Structure and Participants
The committee of “co-researchers” formed the core group that co-implemented the project. They included two community workers, two teachers, two health professionals, two residents, 1 project coordinator and 1 academic researcher. A monthly co-researcher meeting was organised to exchange experiences in the Living Labs and knowledge gained regarding our research question. Most co-researchers were not residents, but worked in or around the neighbourhood and had a direct connection to the local context. Although the same organisations were involved in these meetings, the individuals participating in these meetings evolved. The two residents gradually disengaged from these meetings but remained engaged in Living Labs and activities in the neighbourhood. This point will be further developed in the Critical and Ethical Reflection section, under Dealing with Institutional and Bureaucratic Constrains.
The steering committee monitored the project, steered the course of the project and had budgetary and administrative responsibilities. Their role was also to valorise and disseminate results for research and policy. A meeting was organised every two months. Furthermore, every six months, the junior academic researcher organised focus groups with co-researchers and steering committee members to follow up on the project process, realisations and expectations. Co-researchers and members of the steering committee were all female and aged between 25 and 54. All participating organisations of the steering committee were remunerated by the funding agency.
Finally, many neighbourhood residents and users were involved across the Living Labs and neighbourhood events and workshops, each on a different level and at different phases in the project. They shared their experiences and knowledge of the neighbourhood. The degree of participation across these groups was uneven and fluctuated over time, reflecting both the dynamic nature of the project and the varying capacities and interests of those involved. Some participated punctually in different workshops, while others were present all along the project or could disengage and reengage in another activity. Different types of participants were involved: residents that were patient at the community health centre, members of the neighbourhood committee, students, people working in cultural venues, restaurants, private companies or public institutions,…. While the “professional” co-researchers and steering committee members were formally remunerated, participation of neighbourhood actors was voluntary, except for occasional compensation for facilitation or transport costs.
The Living Labs and co-creation sessions were intentionally designed to include a broad range of neighbourhood actors, residents, local professionals, and users, whose voices and experiences informed the project. However, not all of them participated in the same way or at the same level of decision-making. Two residents were initially part of the co-researcher group and thus engaged in ongoing decision-making processes, whereas most other residents and neighbourhood users contributed through feedback, advice, and idea-sharing during the Living Labs and neighbourhood events. This differentiated participation reflects both the flexibility and the challenges of co-creative research, where participation and shared ownership take different shapes across project phases and actor groups.
Description: Research Design and Process
In this section, we describe how different methodological approaches supported our co-research process. Rather than presenting methods as fixed steps or checklists, we focus on how they served as tools for reflection and dialogue. The aim is to show how these approaches helped to make sense of the co-creative research project and engage critically with co-researchers’ roles and interpretations.
The research design developed in the proposal was based on the different phases of Bonney et al.’s (2009) classification of co-created projects. In the proposal, these phases concerned: (1) a neighbourhood analysis to get to know the neighbourhoods through discussions, walks, surveys and workshops with residents and users (2) defining the research questions and concepts and design of the research (3) experimentation in Living Labs (4) reflection and research using collective discussions and creative methods (5) co-analysis and valorisation: annual research reports, give-back sessions, co-analysis of all material collected in group and dissemination. While this provided an initial structure, the project unfolded as an open-ended and iterative process rather than a fixed sequence. The methods and phases served as tools to support and structure the collaborative learning process, not as rigid steps to follow.
Living Labs as Sites of Co-creation
At the core of MaN’Aige were the different Living Labs, sites of experimentation, action and encounter, that were set up to respond to local needs and answer research questions. A Living Lab “comprises an experimental environment in which new innovative technologies, services and products can be tested. Such labs benefit from the fact that end users and stakeholders are involved in the development, testing and evaluation of innovative developments in a real-life environment” (Smetcoren et al., 2018, p. 97). In the project proposal, 11 Living Labs were conceptualised, based on identified needs by residents and users involved. Examples of these Living Labs were a bike transport service for older people, a clothing exchange point, a meeting point and information centre, a photography exhibition, etc. Throughout the project, however, these Living Labs evolved. The original 11 Living Labs were reduced to six based on factors such as a lack of participants, changing interests and the evolving context and understanding of the project expectations. The reduction from the initial 11 to the final 6 Living Labs was not the outcome of a single decision, but of a dynamic and messy process of collective deliberation that unfolded over several months. Over this period, the co-researcher group met regularly to discuss priorities and possibilities, drawing on ideas and feedback expressed by neighbourhood residents and local partners through workshops and informal exchanges. Rather than a top-down selection, this gradual refinement became a form of co-creation in itself, ensuring that the final Living Labs reflected locally grounded priorities.
Description of the Final 6 Living Labs
Methods as Tools for Learning and Reflection
In the Living Labs, co-researchers experimented with a range of research methods to explore, co-develop and co-implement ideas. Methods were not fixed in advance, but were tailor-made for each Living Lab. Examples included informal discussions, literature reading, neighbourhood walks, neighbourhood mapping, walk-along interviews, etc. The methods were developed by different co-researchers and participants. Some methods served a more general purpose, for example, to bring together ideas and experiences around meeting spaces in the neighbourhood. Other methods aimed at a particular topic and were more in-depth, for example, individual walk-along interviews to map out green spaces in the neighbourhood.
Action-Oriented Methods in Living Labs
Maps were an interesting tool that could be used in different ways and serve different purposes. In MaN’Aige, we used mapping techniques and methods in three different ways. First, we used maps in combination with walks to identify inaccessible spaces or opportunities for green space. Co-researchers used Framacarte, an open-source program to map out the accessibility of pavements and buildings, based on walks with residents and users. In the Living Lab Accessibility, the walks were organised by one of the community health workers, who made a report and presented the results to local politicians.
Second, maps could be used as interactive tools, further than identifying problems. In the case of the living lab Res’O, for example, two co-researchers hung large maps in the entry halls of apartment buildings and businesses. Without meeting them in person, passersby could mark the places they liked or disliked and the way they experienced these places. Just as in the first case, the posters were used to collect input from residents and allowed them to identify some problem areas in the neighbourhood. In a second step, the co-researchers invited neighbourhood users and residents to discussion tables to reflect on the problems marked on the maps and think about possible solutions.
Third, maps could also help to enhance imaginaries. Sometimes it is difficult to imagine how things could be different. In the Living Lab Green Spaces, walks were organised to identify possible spaces to introduce more green, and maps were later discussed. But they went one step further. One of the residents used Photoshop to re-imagine the neighbourhood surface, copying a part of the Royal Park on the rooftop of a concrete parking lot, and imagining the walls covered in green. These images allowed for enhanced discussions on possible transformations in the neighbourhood, together with local politicians.
Collective Moments of Reflexivity and Analysis
Next to these action-oriented methods in Living labs, collective moments of reflexivity were organised to share insights and experiences and reflect upon them. The goal of these collective moments was to follow up on the process of the MaN’Aige project, to collect and exchange experiential knowledge regarding our research questions and to stimulate activities in the Living Labs by sharing ideas and experiences. Every six months, the junior researcher organised a focus group with all co-researchers and the steering committee. Furthermore, co-researchers met monthly in meetings and creative methods were added to these discussions, such as a question of the month and sketchbook sessions. All these collective data collection moments have been recorded and transcribed or summarised by the junior researcher.
Sketchbook sessions were a series of workshops hosted by an artist who lived close to the local service centre, whom we met coincidentally on a bench. Through a series of working sessions in individual sketchbooks and collective discussions, we explored the meanings of connections in a caring neighbourhood with neighbourhood users, but also the connections within the group of co-researchers. In the sessions, the artist urged the importance of having fun and liberating fixed ways of thinking. The working sessions were alternated by collective discussion moments, where the group discussed each other's work. New visions on MaN’Aige’s initial research questions emerged, and it allowed the co-researchers to reflect critically on their positions and preconceived ideas on what constitutes a caring neighbourhood.
Furthermore, a collective and reflexive way of working was also continued in the co-analysis sessions. The collective analysis of MaN’Aige took place at the end of the project in different sessions, spread over four months. The different sessions each covered a different topic concerning our research: connections that contribute to a caring neighbourhood, the co-creative process, the role of neighbourhood users, …
The collective analysis consisted of different, iterative steps. First, the junior researcher gathered all the material: transcripts from monthly meetings, interviews, pictures, reports, posters, post-its, …
Second, each co-researcher shared their own experiences and insights. The third step was an iterative process between reading and coding individually and analysing collectively. Each co-researcher read parts of the material individually and marked ‘codes’, topics that were recurrent, that struck them, that were significant according to them to answer the research questions. We collected the different codes and discussed them together in the group of co-researchers. Co-researchers again sat together in smaller groups to discuss the codes, to make them ‘thicker’. This was discussed again in the larger group.
Based on the discussions, the junior academic researcher assembled a general code list. Co-researchers again coded individually to add elements to this list. In the next step, the group voted for the most interesting topics and selected some of the codes to work further on, again in smaller groups.
Finally, co-researchers arrived at a certain number of topics concerning the research question that formed the basis for the end-report (Degraeve et al., 2022).
The results presented below are based on the collective moments of reflexivity within the project among co-researchers, but also on discussions between the junior and senior academic researchers after the project ended. Although the final results presented in this paper were only discussed between the two academic researchers, the important elements we highlighted were based on multiple discussions, meetings, and focus groups among the committee of co-researchers and steering group.
Critical and Ethical Reflection
In the following section, we reflect on the MaN’Aige project through a joint exercise in reflexivity between the junior and senior academic researchers, based on the ideas and experiences of co-researchers. While we both shared the academic affiliation with the Department of Educational Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), our involvement in the project differed significantly in terms of roles, engagement, and experience. These differences shaped the way we perceived the project’s trajectory, tensions, and outcomes. The reflections presented here are based on a series of discussions, retrospective analysis, and shared writing sessions after the project concluded. They aim to shed light on the often invisible “backstage” processes of participatory research and provide insight into the complexities and discomforts inherent in co-creative research through an ethical lens. We organise our reflections around four key lessons that emerged from our experiences, drawn from moments of collective reflexivity during and after the project.
First, the planned road is never the road taken. What we wrote in the original project proposal, and what we realised is not the same, raising the question: What have we realised? What did we initially expect? What does a ‘successful’ project mean? Second, looking back, a core social justice perspective was lacking, causing feelings of uneasiness and exclusions. Third, understandings of a participatory research paradigm were differing, which made it difficult to create a common ground between and among co-researchers, neighbourhood participants and the funding body. Fourth, tensions arose from dealing with institutional and bureaucratic constraints that hindered trust-building and flexibility.
The Planned Road is Never the Road Taken…
Phases of the MaN’Aige Process
Although we, as academic researchers, initially felt the project was aligned with the principles of co-creative research, in practice, tensions made it difficult to realise principles of social change, inclusion, shared ownership and power in practice. We will further develop these tensions in the next sections.
The Lack of a Social Justice Perspective
The MaN’Aige project originated from a local service centre that aimed to build a caring neighbourhood in two neighbourhoods located outside of their direct environment. Although previous caring neighbourhood initiatives had focused mainly on the support of older people, MaN’Aige aimed at a broader vision to include different actors in the neighbourhood, namely neighbourhood users such as companies, public institutions, local bars and restaurants. Our focus shifted away from individual care needs towards the liveability and accessibility of the neighbourhood space. This was partly due to the composition of the project partners that did not directly include older or care dependent people, but also our shared vision that care concerned everyone in the neighbourhood. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and social contact restrictions at the beginning of the project, reinforced this shift. While MaN’Aige focused on these actors in an inner-city neighbourhood in Brussels, which appeared at first sight to be relatively mixed and not particularly deprived or disadvantaged, co-researchers started questioning: whose voices were we trying to “empower”?
These questions didn’t yield straightforward answers. At first sight, the neighbourhood users that participated appeared relatively privileged and not particularly deprived or disadvantaged. The absence of a clearly defined “oppressed” group made it difficult to position the project within traditional emancipatory frameworks. Yet, as the project unfolded, a more layered picture of exclusion became visible, one that was deeply embedded in the urban fabric and political dynamics of the area. Although the neighbourhood was rich in cultural venues, restaurants and institutions, it lacked basic social infrastructure for residents. Several residents expressed that these institutions and services were “not for them”, reinforcing feelings of disconnection and exclusion. Political actors openly acknowledged that the area was of low electoral interest, and therefore, for many years, not a priority for investment. However, in recent years, the area became of great interest to large companies and high-end real estate projects. While these large corporate actors exerted considerable influence on local large-scale housing development and major urban transformations were occurring, little was invested in public services and space for future inhabitants. Green spaces became increasingly privatised or commodified. This was a clear environmental justice concern. Despite being considered a ‘privileged’ neighbourhood from a statistical point of view, great socio-economic disparities existed between residents. While these forms of exclusion were not always visible from the outset, they became tangible over time. This growing awareness, however, also brought discomfort: we questioned whether the project led to meaningful change. The project had not emerged from within marginalised or excluded communities and merely involved already-engaged residents. The framing of participatory research as empowering risked overlooking systemic constraints and burdening participants further. Acknowledging a more explicit social justice perspective, would have allowed to counter these underlying and unexpected forms of exclusion.
Unclear Understandings of a Participatory Research Paradigm
Tensions arose from different interpretations of “co-creative research” between and among co-researchers, participants and the funding body, but also from the persistence of positivist views on research.
First, participants entered the project with their own goals. Without a shared understanding of the project’s purpose and co-creative principles, genuine collaboration remained fragmented.
Participants and co-researchers initially aimed for concrete actions, but these were not pursued collectively and quickly became diffuse. Each had different interests and visions. At the official project start, the partners expected to realise the Living Lab ideas developed in the proposal and recruit participants to carry them out. However, when the project coordinator and junior researcher presented these to residents and users, expectations differed. Participants lacked ownership and clarity about goals, methods and budgets. Those involved in the initial preparatory phase two years earlier did not recognise their input; others had lost interest or felt overasked. From the start, power struggles surfaced between project partners and the existing neighbourhood organisations about the project’s purpose. Meanwhile, new participants raised new needs and issues not included in the original plan. Still, the paid partners who had invested heavily in preparation were eager to implement the Living Labs. Yet their activities saw low turnout or even distrust. As one neighbourhood participant noted: “You are coming here to do your project, and then you will leave again”. Although partners emphasised the local involvement of local partners, like the community health centre and social workers, participants had the feeling the research was already lined out and did not concern them. The COVID-19 pandemic, beginning four months after the projects’ start, further hindered relationship-building. As a result, residents lacked ownership, even though the initial vision was for them to lead the Living Labs. The raison d’être of the project was not collectively internalised, weakening engagement.
The funding body, meanwhile, expected the project to follow the proposed co-creative research frame. To steer the project in the 'right' direction and avoid losing funding, the academic researchers took the lead in reorienting the process towards “doing research” and increasingly distanced from action. The junior researchers’ role became twofold: facilitating research moments (e.g. introducing theoretical concepts, research design, moments of reflexivity) and supporting participant-led actions. In hindsight, the sudden emphasis on “doing research” - combined with external limitations like COVID-19- led to missed opportunities for tangible change. While participants valued the collective moments of reflexivity as an opportunity to explore, reflect, and learn, it also caused tensions and feelings of being stuck and going slow. The different expectations and an unclear understanding of the participatory research paradigm created confusion, frustration, and tensions.
Second, tensions arose from the persistence of positivist views on research. In some parts the funding body, but also participants adhered to ideas of “good research” as based on theory, clear hypotheses and measurable outcomes. At several moments, participants asked the junior researcher: “What do you need for your research?”, referring to the doctoral thesis. The researcher would answer, “I don’t need anything, my research concerns whatever we do together”. Although attempting to build a shared understanding of participatory research, the frame remained fragmented, unclear and misunderstood. Moreover, not every type of action fitted within the frame of co-creative research. Towards the end of the project, however, a shift occurred. Co-researchers, including the academic researcher, started to experience what being involved in a participatory process meant. Instead of working alone and seeking participants for pre-designed Living Labs - albeit based on local needs and ideas - co-researchers began asking residents and users about their interests and needs and took up roles of support and facilitation. Co-researchers questioned their own roles and positions and started to disrupt ’business-as-usual’. This shift broadened the participation of neighbourhood actors, even if they didn’t formally become co-researchers or did not address the research questions directly.
One example of this shift was the Living Lab collective garden. The care professional at the community health centre transferred a call for projects from the Brussels local government about green space by email to neighbourhood residents. A group gradually formed, based on previous connections, and initiated a collective garden. The care professional played a facilitating role, organising meetings and offering administrative support, while residents led the project. These new connections sparked a further exploration of green spaces, the exchange of seeds, plants and knowledge, educational activities with schools…. The care professional explained how this allowed stepping out of the ‘usual’ patient-focused perspective towards a broader neighbourhood-oriented vision of community health. Instead of having eye only for providing care to patients, the community health worker contributed to caring for the neighbourhood, supporting the people but also the neighbourhood space itself.
Dealing with Institutional and Bureaucratic Constraints
In MaN’Aige, bureaucratic and institutional constraints that existed from the early stages of the project hindered trust-building, ownership, and the flexibility and continuity required in participatory research.
First, administrative procedures and staff assignment disrupted early trust-building (see Table 4). Two preparatory phases preceded the official start of the project and aimed to establish first contacts with residents and neighbourhood users. These phases included exploratory activities such as neighbourhood walks, informal conversations, and social design workshops to identify local needs and potential partners. Although this early groundwork provided valuable insights into the neighbourhood context and initial themes, it proved too limited in time and scope to create a strong common basis for defining the research questions collectively. A project coordinator was hired for six months to start local exploration. Three months later, the funding agency declined the proposal but recommended a revision and resubmission. In the second preparatory phase, another project coordinator was hired to deepen the involvement with neighbourhood users and residents. This revised application was accepted, and official staff were allocated to the project in 2019, two years after the first explorations. Meanwhile, early participants had not been clearly informed of the procedural aspects of the project, such as the decline of the first proposal, the acceptance of the second, the assignment of new staff members and the budget allocation, creating a participation gap and distrust. These early discontinuities affected the entire project and made it difficult to build stable relationships of trust once the project officially started.
Second, staff turnover hampered long-term collaboration. At the official start of the project in November 2019, a new project coordinator (1 FTE), a new junior academic researcher (1 FTE), and 5 other co-researchers (0,2 to 0, 4 FTE each) were hired. The lead coordinator and researcher had not been involved in the preparatory phases. In the following two years, staff members changed across partner organisations. While new staff questioned assumptions, they also lacked the shared experience from earlier stages. Building a collective narrative with changing staff was challenging. When reflecting afterwards, we question whether a genuine co-creative process is possible with such instability. Yet, within the project frame, staff had to match funded roles, percentages and organisational affiliation, or project funding would be lost. More flexibility in budget allocation could have allowed to spend the funding in a more meaningful way.
Third, a bureaucratic logic reinforced power differences among co-researchers. In the project governance, participation was not equally distributed and remunerated. The project coordinator and the academic researcher were employed full-time, while the other co-researchers had only one day a week or less of their time dedicated to the project. Neighbourhood partners were not remunerated. The governance was fixed in advance and, although regularly questioned, could not be adapted during the project. Co-researchers noticed their governance structure reflected larger power imbalances on the level of wages but also regarding legitimacy and voice, between people “working behind desks” and people “on the field”, particularly between academics and social and health workers involved in MaN’Aige.
Finally, the linearity and short-term temporality of academic research and project-based funding clashed with a long-term vision of participatory approaches. The time-pressure and rigid research frames in academic and funding institutions risked tokenism and the instrumentalization of participants. Although the funding body supported co-creative research principles and did not demand measurable outcomes, projects were required to prove high levels of ownership and involvement within a limited timeframe, with engagement formalised through signed consent forms and regular jury sessions. The research, part of a PhD, was experienced by the junior researcher as a balancing act beween expectations on three levels: to meet academic expectations for academic outcomes (e.g. publications, conferences), the funding body's expectations for co-creative research while addressing neighbourhood demands for practical solutions. Activities initiated by co-researchers generated expectations among residents that partner organisations couldn’t sustain due to limited resources. Although co-researchers questioned the linear idea of sustainability focused on deliverables and instead viewed outcomes as more continuously and fluidly, frustrations among participants remained. As an example, a key conclusion of MaN’Aige, the necessity for a network facilitator in the neighbourhood, could not be further realised due to a lack of funding.
This experience shows how linear and predefined requirements by funding bodies and research institutions hinder the flexibility and continuity essential for truly inclusive participatory processes.
Discussion and Conclusion
In this paper we aimed to give insights in the backstage processes of participatory research approaches, based on the experiences of MaN’Aige, a co-creative research in Brussels from the perspective of the two academic researchers involved. One was involved as a junior researcher in the daily life of the project, and the other as a senior researcher supervising the project. Throughout the whole co-creative research process, we found ourselves dealing with moments of improvisation and even discomfort. Participatory research is often idealised, yet in practice, it is much messier and can produce unwanted effects. As such, this paper not only contributes to the methodological literature but also adds to growing calls for greater transparency around the challenges and failures of participatory approaches, on epistemological, institutional and personal levels (Benjamin-Thomas et al., 2018; Boaz et al., 2021). These findings resonate with previous studies on the tensions between ideals and practice in co-creative research (e.g., Boaz et al., 2021; Egid et al., 2021; Turnhout et al., 2020), yet they extend this work by highlighting how institutional and bureaucratic constraints reinforce these tensions.
As academic researchers involved in co-creative research looking back on our experiences, we described four key tensions that emerged in the backstage process: (1) The planned road was not the road taken (2) A core social justice perspective was lacking, causing feelings of uneasiness and exclusions. (3) Understandings of a participatory research paradigm were differing, which made it difficult to create a common ground between and among co-researchers, neighbourhood participants and the funding body. (4) Institutional and bureaucratic constraints hindered trust-building and flexibility. Although the obstacles to genuine trust-building and shared ownership in participatory and co-creative research are widely discussed, literature mainly focuses on improving practices instead of questioning why these processes fail to genuinely countervail power imbalances (Egid et al., 2021; Turnhout et al., 2020).
Taken together, these reflections lead us to foreground the political dimension of co-creative research For critical participatory action research, the criterion of success is not whether participants have followed the steps faithfully, but whether they have a strong and authentic sense of development and evolution in their practices, their understandings of their practices, and the situations in which they practice. (Kemmis et al., 2014, p.18-19)
This implies that a participatory process should come from within (taking voice) and not from the outside (giving voice). As stated by Bourke (2009): “if Participatory Research is to be emancipatory, participants must view their role as emancipatory and want to genuinely engage in a critical reflection about the decisions that they make.” (Bourke, 2009, p.468).
In the case of MaN’Aige, from the early beginning, we should have more explicitly paid attention to this political dimension of participatory and co-creative research among co-researchers. Therefore, instead of only being analysed at the end of the process, critical questions and the project’s emancipatory aim must be taken along throughout the entire research process: Who is involved? Who speaks? Who benefits? Whose voices are silenced? Beyond critique, our experience also offers insights on how to enhance reflexivity in research processes. Instead of ‘gathering data’, creative approaches such as mapping exercises, neighbourhood walks and sketchbook sessions and a collective analysis of data were entry points for reimagining neighbourhood realities, and unsettling dominant ways of seeing. These participatory methods became acts of co-creation in themselves, creating connections and shared understandings between co-researchers, but also opening towards reflexivity in the process.
Our experiences also highlighted that participatory and co-creative paradigms are often poorly understood or vaguely applied, leading to conceptual fuzziness. Participatory and co-creative research are inherently iterative, relational, and messy; yet embracing this messiness is essential if research is to remain meaningful and responsive to those involved (Huang et al., 2024). To better understand and implement co-creative research, the conditions and structures of academic and funding institutions also need to be adapted to this framework. Although research projects may be set up with the best intentions, within the current academic and funding structures, participants remain at the margins of processes (Boaz et al., 2021). Therefore, in Kint et al. (2025), we argue for a shift away from rigid academic or bureaucratic expectations perpetuated by project-funding and academic research logics. Instead, we argue for a clearer understanding of participatory and co-creative research that shifts from positivist views towards the vision of research as a flexible, iterative and creative process. Evaluating research should thus go beyond ‘usual’ metrics like outcomes or results. It should value reflexivity on situated practices and a sense of transformation from within (Kemmis et al., 2014). This requires institutional change. In practical terms, our findings indicate that funding and academic institutions must move beyond checklist-style governance and allow flexibility in budget allocation, partnerships, timelines and research design. To reclaim its radical potential, participatory and co-creative research must be more than a “tick-box” exercise, a method or a set of procedural steps that can be simply added. Engaging in the process of co-creative or participatory research demands the disruption and deconstruction of hierarchical roles in research through a dialogical process and continuous power negotiations (Huang et al., 2024; Puttick, 2021). Building on this perspective, our study contributes to ongoing debates on what counts as research, whose knowledge matters, and what kinds of collaboration are possible. True co-creation may thus begin not by adding methods, but by undoing assumptions. As Lenette (2022) suggests, de-creating dominant research logics and allowing oneself to be challenged, disrupted and questioned, may be the first step towards reimagining more just and inclusive research futures.
Taken together, these findings have several implications for future research and practice on caring neighbourhoods. First, future studies should further explore how caring practices can be sustained beyond project-based initiatives, by structurally embedding the role of connecting figures within local organisations such as community health workers, neighbourhood connectors or care ambassadors (De Donder et al., 2024). Second, caring neighbourhoods should be understood not only as social practices but also as spatial and political ones. Future research could therefore examine how material conditions, such as the design, accessibility, and governance of public and green spaces, create or limit possibilities for care and inclusion in urban environments (Gabauer et al., 2022; Power & Williams, 2019). Third, more attention is needed to the justice dimensions of caring neighbourhoods, including questions on who participates, who benefits, and who remains unseen. Integrating an environmental and social justice lens into both policy and research can help avoid reproducing inequalities under the guise of “care for all” (Raap et al., 2022).
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of the MaN’Aige co-researchers to the reflections presented in this paper. Their ideas and experiences form the base of this paper. Furthermore, the authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Adriana Moreno-Cely and An-Sofie Smetcoren in reviewing the article and providing valuable feedback.
Ethical Considerations
Ethical approval for this research was not required according to the guidelines of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The research did not specifically aim to involve children, minors, or vulnerable persons. There was no personal data collected and participants were informed about the purpose of the study, their right to withdraw at any time, data governance and information on confidentiality.
Consent to Participate
Written and oral consent to participate in the research was obtained from the group of co-researchers, but not from the larger group of neighbourhood residents and users who participated throughout the workshops, talks, walks and activities.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was financed by the Innoviris Co-Create program as a part of the MaN’Aige project (2019-COC-2). The authors received no financial support for the authorship and publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
Part of the data can be made available on request.