Mette Sønderskov, Ingjerd Thon Hagaseth and Arvind Singhal

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Enabling interactive knowledge mobilisation through the positive deviance (PD) approach for youth inclusion in Norway’.

About fifty years ago, the epidemiologist Archibald Cochrane recounted a conversation with a crematorium worker that feels hauntingly relevant today. When asked what fascinated him most about his profession, the man replied, ‘The way in which so much goes in, and so little comes out’.

In the world of evidence-informed policy, we are currently standing at the doors of a similar furnace. We invest staggering amounts of intellectual and financial capital into research, yet the practical yield remains frustratingly slim. We produce mountains of data, but very little of it translates into the lived experience of the communities it is meant to serve. The ‘knowledge-to-action’ gap isn’t just a crack in the pavement; it’s a canyon.

The traditional solution to this problem has been a ‘transfer model’. Experts generate knowledge in a controlled environment and then ‘export’ it to policymakers. When the evidence  fails to take root in policy and practice, the diagnosis is almost always a lack of effective dissemination or a need for ‘stricter’ implementation. But this linear logic ignores a fundamental truth: knowledge is not a package to be delivered; it is a relationship to be cultivated.

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