Economic Crime and the Collaboration Deficit: A Framework for Research-Practice Partnerships

Effective research–practice collaboration requires a trusted ecosystem: a network of relationships, intermediary institutions, shared instruments, and sustained funding. In fields such as health, education, and general policing, this ecosystem exists. In economic crime, it is largely absent. Despite growing policy recognition of the need for cross-sector collaboration in economic crime, the focus remains overwhelmingly operational. The mechanisms to connect academic knowledge with practice are missing. This paper names this problem the 'collaboration deficit' and diagnoses its structural causes.
Drawing on a cross-sector review of how research–practice collaboration works in policing, health, and education, the paper identifies what makes partnerships effective, analyses how existing models can be adapted in the economic crime area, and presents an evidence base for a set of practical collaboration instruments. The key finding is that the most successful collaboration tools across all sectors are deliberately simple boundary objects — short enough to use, flexible enough to adapt, and structured enough to standardise — but that these instruments only function within a trusted ecosystem. Without the relational infrastructure underneath, even well-designed tools remain unused.
The paper makes three contributions: it names the collaboration deficit as a distinct structural problem; it identifies the ecosystem — not the individual partnership — as the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding why collaboration fails in economic crime; and it maps the emerging economic crime collaboration infrastructure, including its current fragility. It accompanies the International Society of Economic Criminology (ISEC) Economic Criminology Collaboration Toolkit (published separately), which operationalises these findings as practical instruments for researchers and practitioners working on economic crime. Both documents are subject to ongoing stakeholder feedback and structured piloting.