Scenarios, risks, policy levers and responses
For each situation, take a moment to think about which communication channel will be the most effective:
- In-person conversations or video calls are especially helpful at the start, when you share perspectives, explore ideas, and build trust together. Avoid sending strong or critical emails early on, since written messages can sometimes heighten tensions.
- Formal written emails help you keep a record of timelines, confirm verbal (Option 1) agreements or set clear deadlines when you can't reach an agreement through conversation (Option 2).
Scenario A: Media hostility and executive pressure
The situation: A public engagement project exploring colonial histories, institutional racism, or health inequalities receives negative coverage in national newspapers or on social media. Senior leadership panics and pressures junior project staff to "tone down," censor, or cancel the initiative midway to protect the university's reputation.
Why is it a racial equity risk? Backing out under external pressure breaks trust with community partners, undermines academic freedom, and leaves low-seniority staff to absorb community fallout and distress alone.
Policy levers: REF 2029 Strategy, people and research environment (SPRE) | Public Sector Equality Duty (Equality Act 2010).
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Strategic negotiations to scenario A
Option 1
"I understand leadership’s concern about media visibility. However, this project directly fulfils our university’s published Anti-Racism Strategy, our REF Impact goals, and our Public Sector Equality Duty. Cancelling or censoring it midway creates serious ethical and reputational risks by breaking community trust. Let's work directly with the Communications Office to issue a public statement that re-anchors the project in our core institutional values."
Option 2
"Abandoning co-created work with local community partners under press pressure causes catastrophic, long-term damage to our institution's civic trust and directly exposes us to PSED non-compliance. Public engagement practitioners and precarious researchers cannot carry the burden of managing national political press friction. If senior
management insists on modifying or cancelling this project, that decision and its formal justification must be communicated directly by senior leadership to our community partners, rather than expecting the project team to absorb that fallout."
⚠️Backlash warning: Pushing back against executive panic can create short-term institutional tension. Ensure you engage a Quadrant A senior sponsor or trade union representative to insulate junior or fixed-term staff. |
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Scenario B: Consultation loops
The situation: A proposal for racially equitable community funding, co-governance, or curriculum transformation is stalled indefinitely. Bureaucratic gatekeepers claim the initiative must pass through multiple uncoordinated ethics boards, legal reviews, finance subcommittees or external audits, creating an endless loop of procedural delays.
Why is it a racial equity risk? Bureaucratic stonewalling uses administrative fatigue to exhaust change agents and community partners without senior leaders ever having to say "no explicitly." This leads to community partner burnout, missed grant windows, and broken institutional commitments.
Policy levers: University Governance Regulations | Executive Policy Waivers.
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Strategic negotiations to scenario B
Option 1
"This proposal has spent several months cycling through separate governance committees without a definitive decision. Treating standard procedural reviews as an indefinite holding pattern compromises our project timelines and community commitments. Can we schedule a single 30-minute joint review with the key committee chairs to resolve outstanding questions and establish clear approval criteria within the next 14 days?"
Option 2
"To ensure we do not default on our external grant agreement, we are establishing a strict two-week window for final governance sign-off. If no specific, written policy violations are identified by [Insert Date 14 days out], we will proceed under the assumption of institutional approval. If standard finance and ethics policies cannot accommodate direct
community partnership funding, we formally request senior leadership to sign an executive policy waiver rather than forcing external partners to absorb our administrative paralysis."
⚠️Backlash warning: Enforcing a strict 14-day decision window or invoking default approval may provoke administrative pushback, accusations of "bypassing governance," or procedural obstruction from risk-averse committee chairs. Ensure all communications are formally documented in writing and copied to leadership. |
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Scenario C: Predatory "standard templates"
The situation: A "lived-experience" practitioner enters a public engagement initiative based on promises of shared governance, equal partnership, and co-creation. However, when formal paperwork arrives from the university’s legal or procurement department, the partner is presented with a "standard template agreement." The contract denies the partner ownership of intellectual property (assigning all creative assets, data, and outputs exclusively to the university). It includes liability clauses that expose the under-resourced partner to severe financial risk.
Why is it a racial equity risk? Forcing corporate contract terms onto community partners operates as an institutional "bait-and-switch." It commodifies community expertise, strips partners of their intellectual property, and shifts legal liabilities onto under-resourced groups who lack in-house legal teams to review or contest predatory language. When engagement teams act as passive messengers for unfair institutional legal frameworks, they destroy relational trust and reinforce colonial dynamics of extraction. So it is harmful even if unintentional.
Policy levers: Creative Commons Licensing | Custom IP Schedules.
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Strategic negotiations to scenario C
Option 1
"Telling a community partner that an extractive agreement is 'just our standard university template' breaches our ethical partnership commitments. We cannot promise co-creation in our project pitch and then enforce corporate IP extraction and broad liability transfers in
our paperwork. How can we work with central Legal to issue a custom Community Partnership Schedule that reflects civic collaboration rather than treating a local non-profit like a commercial vendor?"
Option 2
"Demanding that the university retain sole ownership of intellectual property and creative assets produced through community co-design exploits community knowledge. Intellectual property rooted in lived experience belongs to the community or must be governed under a shared Creative Commons framework. Our project team will not act as messengers for unfair corporate terms. We require Procurement and Legal to insert a non-exclusive, mutual IP licensing clause and liability cap before this document is issued to our partner."
⚠️Backlash warning: Refusing corporate legal templates or demanding custom IP co-ownership can trigger resistance from central Legal and Procurement, who may accuse the team of creating unnecessary administrative precedents or legal exposure. Frame the request explicitly as a civic engagement compliance necessity. |
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Scenario D: Scientific objectivity claims
The situation: When community knowledge, oral histories, or anti-racist frameworks are integrated into scientific programming, academic leads or reviewers object, asserting that "science is neutral and objective" and that introducing frameworks around power, colonialism, or race "biases the research."
Why is it a racial equity risk? Weaponising "neutrality" masks the historical and colonial biases embedded within institutional science. It dismisses community expertise as "subjective opinion" while treating traditional academic methodologies as universally objective truths.
Policy levers: Research Integrity Frameworks | Empirical Methodological Standards.
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Strategic negotiations to scenario D
Option 1
"Integrating structural inequality and community knowledge into our research design directly improves its scientific validity. Scientific methodologies are designed by human institutions, which historically carry systemic biases. Excluding historical context, demographic realities, and systemic health barriers produces incomplete data. Equity is not an added bias; it is a requirement for academic rigour."
Option 2
"Lived experience and community expertise are empirical realities, not 'opinions'. Dismissing local knowledge while treating institutional practices as undisputed truth reinforces epistemic exclusion. Our co-produced project methodology explicitly evaluates both academic and community knowledge as rigorous and complementary empirical data under our research governance framework."
⚠️Backlash warning: Challenging traditional academic "neutrality" or asserting that community lived experience constitutes empirical data can evoke academic elitism and claims that scientific standards are being compromised. Re-anchor your argument in institutional research culture framework criteria (e.g., REF PCE). |
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Scenario E: Financial gatekeeping
The situation: Finance departments insist that community partners, lived-experience advisors, and youth researchers must be paid via retroactive expense reimbursements (requiring receipts, personal bank statements, and weeks of processing time) rather than direct upfront payments, honoraria grants, or immediate cash/voucher transfers.
Why is it a racial equity risk? Retroactive reimbursement forces low-income or minoritised participants to act as interest-free lenders to multi-million-pound institutions. It creates financial hardship, excludes lower-income individuals from participating, and reinforces class and racial privilege.
Policy levers: Standing Financial Instructions (SFI) | Emergency Advance & Voucher Systems | PSED.
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Strategic negotiations to scenario E
Option 1
"Expecting community members and minoritised partners to pay upfront for project travel and labor, and then wait 60 days for reimbursement, creates severe economic exclusion. The university possesses established mechanisms for advance disbursements, guest stipends, and direct procurement orders. How can Finance help us process this payment through our emergency advance system rather than standard supplier accounts?"
Option 2
"Forcing minoritised partners to absorb upfront costs violates our institutional Equality Act commitments regarding accessible participation. If central Finance refuses to issue advance disbursements directly to our partners, our department will utilize internal discretionary overhead accounts to front these funds immediately, absorbing the processing delay internally rather than passing financial hardship onto the community."
⚠️Backlash warning: Demanding emergency advance payments or utilizing internal overhead accounts to bypass reimbursement delays may irritate finance officers or trigger claims of SFI non-compliance. Secure written sign-off from your Head of Department before reallocating discretionary funds. |
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Scenario F: The "tick-box" advisory board
The situation: A research centre establishes a Community Public Engagement Advisory Board to fulfil funder requirements for a multi-million-pound urban health and climate initiative. The board comprises four minoritised community leaders and civic organisers alongside six senior academics and university directors. Over six months, the board conducts deep reflective sessions, reviews project plans, and produces a comprehensive strategic report. The project leadership praises the advisory board’s reflection paper as "groundbreaking, deeply thoughtful, and inspiring." However, when project delivery begins, zero structural changes occur. When the board points out that their strategic recommendations have been ignored, the chair responds with warm deflection
("We value this reflection immensely, but structural university policies take years to change; let's focus on what we can do informally within our current sessions").
Why is it a racial equity risk? Using community expertise for high-level reflective labour without building the structural mechanisms, governance levers, or administrative pathways to translate that reflection into operational change turns engagement into an extractive, decorative exercise. It consumes community time and intellectual labour to generate "institutional learning capital" for the university while keeping actual resources, decision-making power, and restrictive policies completely intact.
Policy levers: REF 2029 Research Culture Audits | Executive Board Agenda Rights.
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Strategic negotiations to scenario F
Option 1
"Praising an advisory board's strategic reflection paper while failing to table it before the Executive Board or Finance Committee is strategic isolation. Claiming that 'policies take years to change' ignores existing mechanisms for subcontracting and policy waivers. We need a formal item placed on the next Executive Board agenda to vote on the board's core structural requirements."
Option 2
"Submitting an advisory board's reflection report to funders or research culture audits (such as REF 2029) as evidence of successful engagement—after rejecting all of its core operational recommendations—constitutes ethical misrepresentation. Reflection without execution is extraction. As project leads, we will not sign off on public engagement milestone returns until central finance records the budget reallocation and operational delivery schedules required by the board."
⚠️Backlash warning: Refusing to sign off on public engagement returns or exposing performative governance can anger senior project chairs and risk professional isolation. Ensure you align with other advisory board members and document all unfulfilled operational recommendations in official meeting minutes. |
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