Partnership Development Grant

A Partnership Development Grant (PDG) is a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funding mechanism that supports the early-stage development of a formal research partnership between an academic researcher and one or more non-academic partner organizations. It is a Tri-Agency instrument in the sense that it sits within Canada’s broader Tri-Agency (SSHRC/NSERC/CIHR) partnership-funding architecture, but PDGs themselves are administered by SSHRC only, for projects in or connecting to the social sciences and humanities.

Operationally, what makes a project a PDG — rather than a standard Insight Grant or a full Partnership Grant — is the combination of (1) a defined non-academic partner (or partners) who will meaningfully co-shape the research or knowledge-mobilization activity, not simply receive its outputs, and (2) a developmental purpose: the funds are meant to build or test a partnership approach, not to sustain an already-mature, multi-institution collaboration at scale. SSHRC states the program exists to “support the development of partnered research and related activities in the social sciences and humanities.”

Funding amount and duration

PDGs are individual grants of $75,000 to $250,000 over one to three years (2026 competition figures; the ceiling was $200,000 for the 2025 competition, so applicants should confirm current-year figures against the live SSHRC competition page rather than assume the amount is static year over year). This is materially smaller and shorter than a full Partnership Grant, which funds new or existing formal partnerships at up to $2.5 million over four to seven years (Stage 2), following a mandatory Stage 1 application capped at $30,000.

Relationship to the Partnership Grant

PDGs are frequently described — including by institutional research offices — as a stepping stone toward a full Partnership Grant application, and in practice many partnerships do progress from a smaller Partnership Engage Grant or Partnership Development Grant into a Partnership Grant once the collaboration has proven itself. It is important to be precise here, though: SSHRC’s own program FAQ states this progression is not a requirement — a PDG is a separate, standalone funding opportunity in its own right, not a mandatory gate that must be cleared before a Partnership Grant application is eligible. A research office advising a principal investigator should frame the PDG as a genuine, fundable end in itself (testing a partnership model, generating preliminary partnered research) that can also position a team well for a subsequent, larger application — not as a compulsory first stage.

Eligibility, at a high level

Applicant eligibility follows SSHRC’s standard individual-researcher rules: the applicant must, with limited exceptions for postdoctoral researchers, be affiliated with a Canadian postsecondary institution that holds institutional eligibility, both at the time of application and before funds can be released. Researchers whose primary affiliation is with a non-Canadian institution are not eligible as applicants, even if they hold a secondary Canadian affiliation.

On the partner side, eligibility is broader and reflects the program’s cross-sector purpose:

• Partner organizations may be Canadian or international, and may come from the academic, public, private, or not-for-profit sectors.
• Co-applicants or collaborators from international postsecondary institutions are eligible.
• Within Canada, individuals from the not-for-profit sector and provincial/municipal government may serve as co-applicants or collaborators; individuals from the private sector and the federal government are generally limited to a collaborator role rather than co-applicant.

Because eligibility rules, deadlines, and funding ceilings are revised competition to competition, this page describes the mechanism’s structure and purpose rather than reproducing a specific year’s instructions verbatim — research offices and applicants should always confirm current figures and deadlines against SSHRC’s live competition page before drafting a budget or nomination.

Worked example

A sociology researcher at a Canadian university wants to co-design a community-engagement methodology with a provincial not-for-profit social services agency, where the agency will help shape the research questions and co-produce knowledge-mobilization outputs (not just supply data or serve as a study site). The project is exploratory: the partnership approach itself needs to be piloted and refined before either party would be ready to commit to a four-to-seven-year, multi-partner Partnership Grant. This is a canonical PDG scenario — a bounded, developmental partnership with a genuine non-academic co-shaping role.

Counter-example

A researcher applying for standard operating funds to conduct an independent study, where a community organization has only agreed to provide access to a research site or a dataset without otherwise shaping the research design or knowledge-mobilization plan, is not describing a PDG-eligible partnership — that relationship is better characterized as a data-access or recruitment arrangement, and the application would more likely fall under an Insight Grant or Insight Development Grant instead.

Related concepts

The PDG sits alongside two other SSHRC partnership-funding tiers not covered in depth on this page: Partnership Engage Grants (smaller, short-turnaround grants for a specific, discrete partnered activity) and the full Partnership Grant (large-scale, long-duration formal partnerships, described above). See also knowledge mobilisation (KMb), a frequent output category for PDG-funded work, and pump-priming funding, the broader category of research funding this mechanism belongs to conceptually. Research administrators managing Tri-Agency awards more broadly should also see TCPS2 (Tri-Council Policy Statement) for the ethics-review framework that applies once human-participant research is involved, and the Canada Research Chair (CRC) program for a different (non-partnership) Tri-Agency funding instrument.