The impact agenda and continuing debate around public engagement, impact and relevance (economic, political or otherwise) is having a significant influence on the global university sector. This debate has been fuelled by the banking failure in the late 2000s, which saw politicians, economists and (rather more unsettlingly) some academics seek justification for universities primarily through their contributions to economic growth (Rhoten and Calhoun, 2011). With their academic labour less evidently linked to economic outputs, academics working in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences have come under particular pressure. As a response to the dominance of the economic, other metrics of impact have been mobilised. These stress connection and engagement with, and responsiveness to, the needs of ‘local communities’ through increasingly participatory approaches to knowledge production. In the UK, the mechanisms for measuring and embedding ‘community oriented impact’ have begun to take hold through the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and bodies designed to support universities in their public engagement strategies such as the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE), The Wellcome Trust, Catalyst Public Engagement Beacons and embedded university public engagement departments. Meanwhile, new funding streams have opened up, including the Research Council UK (RCUK) Connected Communities programme, designed to promote collaborative endeavours and co-production between academics, artists, public service providers and a range of community groups.

Similarly, the focus on collaborative working and co-production has been subject to scholarly discussions. In August 2014, Wendy Larner's Royal Geographical Society (with Institute for British Geographers) keynote address heard by a number of scholars pointed to the multiple sites where co-production was adopted within the discipline of geography. The range of submissions emerged from a number of disciplines to speak about the topic of co-production. Almost 1800 participants contributed to more than 380 individual sessions. They reflected on the challenges, opportunities and interdisciplinary understandings that arise when different perspectives have been brought in the field of geography. Some examples came from cultural geographers who had been working with museums or other cultural institutions to create new forms of knowledge between academic researchers, cultural institutions and publics – co-production is the term used for the opening up of cultural institutions.