Knowledge Brokering between Research and Government

London, UK

22 September, 2021

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Background

The urgency to share well substantiated evidence on the effectiveness of policy interventions increases when policymakers worldwide share the same goals. The Covid 19 Crisis clearly created such an urgency; the underlying ambitions are more structural. In the past decade, momentum has been created by:

• the UK, where “What Works Centers” and “Behavior Insight Teams” have been established and have been copied in many countries
• the USA, by signing the “Foundations for Evidence Based Policy Act”  into law in 2019
• Australia and Canada, where Delivery Units have emerged to predict and measure the effects of national political goals
• Scandinavia and the Netherlands we see new ex ante- and Strategic Evaluation methods therewith stimulating evidence informed- and experimental policymaking

In all these processes we see researchers, both from academia and from governmental research bodies, trying to improve policymaking with rigorous evidence. This also takes place within the World Bank, the EU and the UN.  This seminar will investigate how we can transfer and apply such evidence, developed in a research environment, into a policy environment.

The emergence of a profession?

The need to substantiate governmental decision making with evidence is as old as governments exist. What is new, is the emergence of intermediaries who translate, disseminate or apply research results in a public environment. The experts include, but may not be limited to:

• Policy evaluators, who assess the effectiveness of policy interventions in different phases
• Academic experts who develop evidence through research, methodologies and RCT’s.
• Data scientists specialized in creating instruments for government use
• Governmental & Parliamentary researchers and strategists

Issues to treat

Access to new knowledge for policymakers

• Creating your own knowledge base: Data search and access to statistics
• How to get an effective overview of existing scientific research
• Organizing expert opinions
• Access to public research databases (national, international)

Creating new policy knowledge

• Structuring university-policy collaboration
• How to connect demand and supply
• Joint working spaces
• Value and pricing issues
• Time management

Translating knowledge to policy conclusions

• On facts, figures and research outcome: who is drawing which conclusions for whom?
• When is your policy statement evidence based?
• Are research outcomes fixed or flexible?
• From knowledge to strategy and back
• How to share research outcomes for both policymakers and parliamentarians

Translating evidence to politics and the public

• Communicating evidence to the public
• Working with journalists
• Communicating evidence based policies, who’s responsible for what?

 

Terms & costs