Chapter
Research infrastructure
Sumathipala, A.
2014.
S. Okpaku (Eds.),
Essentials of global mental health (pp. 407-415).
Cambridge University Press.
ISBN: 978-1-139-13634-1
Despite infrastructure being widely cited as a core component of research capacity building, it has been restricted to a narrow category of physical or administrative inputs. The terms research infrastructure, capacity, and culture, which are overlapping components, have been artificially separated and used in inconsistent ways, dissociating their relationships with associated concepts (Coen et al. 2010). Coen et al. strongly argued for “an expanded conceptualization of research infrastructure; one that moves beyond conventional ‘hardware’ notions.” Drawing on a case analysis of NEXUS, a multidisciplinary health research center/hub based at the University of British Columbia, Canada, they have proposed a conceptual framework to integrate the tangible and intangible structures that interactively underlie research center functioning, and they envision infrastructure as a relational construct comprised of multiple and interactive parts.