Reflexive deliberation in international research collaboration: Minimising risk and maximising opportunity

International research collaboration raises questions about how groups from different national and institutional contexts can work together for common ends. This paper uses issues that have arisen in carrying out the first stage of an international research project to discuss a framework designed to map different kinds of multi-national research collaboration in terms of increasing complexity and increasing time to research outputs. The paper explores factors that enable and that constrain progress in carrying out collaborative research. The paper highlights the complex interplay within research practice of factors that derive from institutional structures and those that appertain to individuals as agents. It uses the personal and collective reflexive deliberations of the authors, to demonstrate that as the complexity of the research interface increases, and as the time to research outputs increases, so structural risk increasingly develops into agentic risk, and that structural risk becomes increasingly required to be managed through agentic action. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht