2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(1) statelessness. First, place-based working enables the co-design of a shared research agenda alongside partners, which provides many opportunities for relevant, iterative and impactful research. Challenges also emerge in straddling the line between research and action, for instance defining realistic projects, setting appropriate ethical boundaries, clarifying the ‘boundary’ position and contribution of the researcher, identifying suitable resources and delivering on a timescale to suit policymakers. Not every local project will be successful, and research design focussed on specific areas needs also to consider issues of wider generalisability. However, place-based working facilitates the growth of stronger long-term relationships and ongoing two-way diffusion of knowledge which can benefit both academics and partner agencies. Second, place-based working enables the development of a systemic perspective, which can assist researchers and practitioners in envisaging how multi-layered influences combine dynamically in ways that are particular to person and space. Place-based working allows us to map key actors within a system and understand their complementary roles and how they overlap, as well as identifying systemic gaps. Again, systems will vary from place to place, particularly in terms of actor relationships and institutions working at the grassroots level, but our action research with practitioners has shown that issues such as pressures on resources and experiences of central to local power dynamics are often shared across contexts. Third, place-based work underlines how the lived-experiences of survivors can be incorporated to co-produce some of the solutions needed. Survivors hold key information that can be used to help the police to disrupt modern slavery activities. This improves the ability of communities to spot the signs of slavery, allows frontline staff to discover and free more people from positions of exploitation, and aids statutory service providers and NGOs in significantly enhancing the support that is provided to survivors. With the majority (73 per cent) of survivors referred to the National Referral Mechanism being non-UK nationals 12 the value of ‘stateless’ survivor voices to the successful delivery of a slavery-free community is considerable. Lastly, place-based working enables the identification of assets as well as deficits within systems, helping to identify solutions. Our recent work has focussed on establishing the factors underpinning resilience against exploitation in communities, drawing upon eco-systems research from the late twentieth century 13 to propose an adaptive cycle of anti-slavery resilience. 14 Unlike approaches that focus solely on risk or vulnerability, the adaptive cycle takes the identification of vulnerabilities as a starting point to diagnose areas for change, and goes on to sense-check the diagnosis by incorporating community and survivor voices into the conversation. In turn, this creates momentum to challenge cultural practices and institutions that permit exploitation to continue and puts pressure on local and national policymakers to enact the policy and legislative changes needed to normalise and sustain resilience. Localities will not always be able to push back against significant legislative or structural influences that cause 12 13 14 2019 NRM End of Year Summary (n 1). C S Holling, ‘Resilience of Ecosystems: Local Surprise and Global Change’ in William C Clarke and R E Munn (eds), Sustainable Development of the Biosphere (Cambridge University Press 1986) 292. Alison Gardner, Phil Northall and Ben Brewster, ‘Building Slavery Free Communities: A Resilience Framework’ (2020) Journal of Human Trafficking (forthcoming). 151