We engage with a broad and diverse group of partners in our work, including researchers, policymakers, governments, parliamentarians, people with lived experience, businesses, civil society and many others.
Why is partnership so important to us?
Collaboration is one of our central values and is essential to the PEC’s mission. We work with partners because we believe it is the best way to generate robust evidence and transform the effectiveness of laws and policies that can ensure our human rights and protect our dignity, security and freedom from exploitation.
We firmly believe that collaboration is essential to generating the best evidence for laws and policies to truly reflect how exploitation unfolds in the real world. By bringing together organisations and individuals that have different expertise, knowledge, experiences and perspectives, we aim for new thinking to emerge, giving rise to new solutions, grounded in the latest evidence.
Human rights harms relating to modern slavery, including human trafficking, child exploitation in online spaces, violence against women and girls, the impacts of migration policies, and exploitative labour practices in supply chains, are complex, with many different dimensions. It is essential that we work in diverse and inclusive partnerships if we are to truly understand the complexities and overcome them.
Our partnerships work aims to help the PEC:
- Facilitate new collaborations in research between those who have not previously worked together, and
- Build and sustain a ‘network of networks’ of people who produce evidence on the best ways of addressing human rights-related exploitation and those who might use this evidence to build the most effective laws, policies and practices.
Partnership principles
We approach partnerships with a set of key values in mind:
- Equality, diversity and inclusion, particularly through involving people with lived experience of modern slavery and related human rights harms, and managing uneven power dynamics between partners
- Transparency: we are open about what our priorities and objectives are
- Collaboration: we aim to work closely with others, learning from them and building on the progress they have already made
- Stakeholder engagement: we consult regularly and widely on our research priorities; we actively seek feedback on our ways of working
- Reciprocity: we expect our partners to commit to these values in their engagement with us
- Joint learning: we and our partners commit to sharing knowledge and learning
Get in touch
We would love to hear from you directly to talk about how we could collaborate. Please contact Owain Johnstone, Partnerships Lead (owain.johnstone@humanities.ox.ac.uk). We welcome approaches from organisations or individuals who are interested in working with us, including in ways not listed here.
