ARC Celebrates 10 Years of Partnership-Based Action Research
Next Thursday, October 22, the Accountability Research Center (ARC) will celebrate its 10-year anniversary with an in-person panel event and reception at SIS. For ten years, ARC has been co-creating action research on many aspects of accountability and participation with partners in countries including Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, India, and the Philippines. At the anniversary event, members of the ARC team will discuss what it takes to do this kind of partnership-based action research for social change, and colleagues from other organizations will comment on ARC's influence in the accountability community of practice.
For Director Jonathan Fox, the event “brings together researchers and practitioners to reflect on ARC’s decade of engagement with communities of practice working for more accountable governance in a wide range of countries and sectors.”
The partnership-based action research and learning that ARC enables seeks to strengthen accountability strategies, coalitions, and networks across the world. In 2025-26, this included several initiatives for health rights, based on an action learning partnership with grassroots advocates for equitable access to maternal, child and adolescent health care. These range from an original study of participation in public consultations about the Mexican government’s new midwifery regulations, to cross-country learning exchanges on network strengthening, traditional midwives, and strategic communications in health rights advocacy in Guatemala, Mexico, and the Philippines.
Additionally, ARC’s ongoing research and learning work with fisher organizations around labor rights and access to remedy included the launch of the report from a six-country study, Upwelling: Fishers Organizing for their Rights and Sustainable Fisheries – in five languages. The research fed into multi-stakeholder learning exchanges which strengthened fisher advocacy networks in Mexico, Ghana and Indonesia, and has seeded future work.
These are just a few examples of ARC’s impact over the past 10 years, built on its collaborative approach. This supports mutual learning between researchers and practitioners, and centers practitioners as analysts, targeting their insights towards international audiences of counterparts and potential allies.
In addition to its work in the accountability community of practice, ARC’s influence on students is also impactful. In its first decade, ARC has convened 7 practica courses, providing practical, real-world research experience to 81 masters’ students, and four versions of a Masters’ course on Social Accountability. It has also engaged 21 graduate students as research assistants, six of whom earned their PhDs, and five of whom went on to become ARC team researchers.
“Working with graduate students both hones their applied research skills and models collaboration with diverse practitioners,” said Fox. “As in our external research collaborations, we try to align our agendas to play to students’ strengths, while combining rigor with relevance.”
Idah Knowles, a current Research Associate at ARC who earned her M.A. in Global Governance, Politics, and Security from SIS in May 2026, began working for ARC during her time at SIS and supports policy research, project development, and programs on open government and civil society engagement in Africa and the Global South. Her Accountability Working Paper “Open Parliaments in Africa: The Cases of Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and the Pan-African Parliament,” published in October 2025, was launched during the 2025 Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit in Spain where she also spoke as a panelist on "Building a Culture of Youth Participation in Politics". The paper has since been republished by Columbia International Affairs platform and the AGORA Portal for Parliamentary Development and cited in the OGP Independent Reporting Mechanism Results Report (2025), and connections made in Spain led to Knowles’ appointment as Youth Ambassador for the 2026 International Anti-Corruption Conference.
“ARC gave me intellectual mentorship, collaboration, and a global platform,” said Knowles. “As ARC celebrates 10 years, I am grateful to be one of the many students who are living testaments to how it turns student inquiry into global engagement and learning alongside frontline partners who organize citizens and reform policy.”
Another ARC Research Associate, Connor Moynihan, graduated from SIS’s Natural Resources and Sustainable Development M.A. program in 2023 and now researches corporate accountability in the seafood sector, working closely with senior researcher Judy Gearhart. He has documented fisher organizing and promoted organizers’ access to policy and management conversations that set the agendas for their workplaces. As a student, his practicum supported market research that fed into coalition work on fisheries governance and corporate duties in their supply chains and contributed to the aforementioned Upwelling ARC Working Paper that he co-authored in May 2025.
“Through ARC I have had the opportunity to conduct field interviews, desk research, lead international events, publish papers, and earn a seat on a coalition steering committee,” said Moynihan. “My work with ARC has exposed me to a wide world of seafood accountability and helped me to raise my voice in support of those not in the room.”
Looking ahead to the next 10 years of ARC, Fox believes the center is well-positioned to face an evolving global landscape through its engagement with diverse partners and its collaborative work to advance transparent, participatory, and accountable governance.
“Strong headwinds around the world challenge efforts by civil society and policy reformers to defend and deepen initiatives for accountable governance,” said Fox. “This underscores the relevance of ARC’s focus on long-term partnerships to learn from strategies for building countervailing power.”
Learn more about and RSVP to ARC's 10-year anniversary event.