The forest or the trees? What we know about Covid-19 advisory bodies

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Clemence Bouchat, Sonja Blum, Ellen Fobé and Marleen Brans

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Policy advisory bodies during crises: a scoping review of the COVID-19 literature in Europe’.

The number of academic papers written about advice and policymaking increased following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. When this kind of scholarship boom happens, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. In our Evidence & Policy paper, ‘Policy advisory bodies during crises: a scoping review of the COVID-19 literature in Europe’, we clarify what actually came out of this new scholarship. We focus on the structures that formally provided policy advice to European governments during the pandemic, such as government agencies, ad hoc taskforces and research institutes.

Our review spanned 981 academic outputs published between 2020 and 2023. The review protocol follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. In the end, a corpus of 59 publications informed our findings.. Our corpus was mostly composed of qualitative studies, studies about the UK and Sweden, and studies that examined the first half of 2020. We found that the academic community has mostly focused on advisory body composition, body structure and the advisory process.

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Examining evidence-integrated codesign as a program quality assurance strategy

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Sarah Walker and Larry Norman

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Codesigning youth diversion programmes with community-led organisations: a case study’.

The equitable use of social science is a persistent governance challenge, particularly in applied social science and psychosocial treatment research. A common approach in applied social science is testing learning tools such as checklists, guides, manuals and trainings. These tools are developed to support behavior change at multiple levels and can be aimed at individuals, organisations or systems. To become evidence-based, these tools are tested against a control, ‘as usual’, or equivalent group. If effective in comparison, the package is then purveyed with the coveted ‘evidence-based’ moniker. Governments eager for tested approaches, as part of responsible governance, are then motivated to buy these tools and they are typically delivered by purveyor organisations as completed packages.

Some previous efforts focused on addressing both evidence-informed and community-engaged values have resorted to ‘list selection’ approaches in which community is involved in selecting a package from a pre-assembled list of programs. This approach engages community choice but limits the opportunity for community to contribute to more substantive design in the framing and content of these programs.

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Policy to research policy fellowship programmes: forging connections and knowledge exchange between policymakers and researchers

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Nicola Buckley and Kathryn Oliver

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Evaluating Policy to Research Fellowship programmes’.

Policy to Research (P2R) Fellowship programmeshave been found toforge connections and relationships between policymakers and researchers in academia and beyond, develop skills and knowledge among policymakers and researchers and can develop collaborative projects.

In our Evidence and Policy paper, we found 24 P2R Policy Fellowship programmes to study, from the UK, Europe and North America. The cost of providing these fellowships was estimated at around £5,000 per Policy Fellow, which is comparable to, or in some cases less than other methods for academic-policy engagement (e.g. workshops, training, Research to Policy Fellowships, funding research collaborations). More evaluations are needed to understand the role these Fellowships can play in developing the evidence-for-policy system.

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Which staffers are worth forming relationships with to further science?

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Patrick O’Neill, Jessica Pugel, Elizabeth C. Long, D. Max Crowley and Taylor Scott

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Insight for knowledge brokers: factors predicting relationships with federal staffers’.

When it comes to furthering the reach of scientific evidence in policymaking processes, a large body of research has shown just how crucial personal relationships between researchers and policymakers can be. These personal relationships can help offset the overloading workload of policymakers and their staffers, especially considering they often rely on trusted sources for advice and information. However, there are often group norms, systemic differences, and other obstacles standing in the way of relationships between policymakers and researchers initially forming.

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Exploring the lived experiences of university-based knowledge brokers and marginalised academics to better understand EDI within academic-policy engagement

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Laura Bea and Alejandra Recio-Saucedo

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘EDI in academic–policy engagement: lived experience of university based knowledge brokers and marginalised academics’.

Equity, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)[1] in the world of Higher Education, public policy and everything in between has received increasing attention over the past few years especially. Within academic-policy engagement specifically, key actors have identified the need to diversify participation and knowledges (Morris et al, 2021; Hopkins et al, 2021; Walker et al, 2019). Additionally, Oliver et al (2022) reported that there is currently a ‘busy but rudderless mass of activity’ within knowledge mobilisation, and called for further practice that is informed by ‘existing evidence and theory’ (694). Notwithstanding the high level of activity, a gap in understanding what EDI in the context of academic-policy engagement really means still exists. Alongside this, there is a gap in understanding and knowing how EDI is understood and experienced by knowledge brokers, how university knowledge brokers drive it, and what strategies are being used to ensure EDI is embedded within academic-policy engagement activities (and what it even means to do this!).

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The knowledge broker within: understanding evidence use inside public agencies

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Louise Shaxson, Rick Hood, Annette Boaz and Brian Head

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Knowledge brokering inside the policy making process: an analysis of evidence use inside a UK government department’.

Knowledge brokering is often presented as a way of ensuring that evidence reaches government departments, but we have little understanding of what happens next. Our research shows that some civil servants can also act as internal knowledge brokers between evidence and policy. This raises important questions for how we understand processes of evidence-informed policymaking.

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Bridging the boundaries between research evidence and local policy development

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Nicola Carroll and Adam Crawford

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Cultivating ‘communities of practice’ to tackle civic policy challenges: insights from local government-academic collaboration in Leeds’.

Working across sectoral boundaries offers exciting prospects for academics and municipal policymakers to develop innovative solutions to local issues through exploring shared concerns from their distinct professional perspectives. Yet organisational boundaries present well-recognised impediments to research-policy interaction. Drawing on findings from a Review of Collaboration between academics and local government officers in Leeds, we propose that active cultivation of civic ‘communities of practice’ offers a promising approach for connecting research evidence with social, environmental and economic challenges that confront local authorities and their citizens.

Crucially, we argue that boundary crossing relationships between professionals are key facilitators of effective civic collaboration that need to be nurtured and supported organisationally. This means putting inter-sectoral mechanisms in place that help ‘bridge’ institutional divides, without stifling the enthusiasm and dynamism that underpins meaningful knowledge exchange.   

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Evidence & Policy Call for Papers – Exploring the Role of Youth-led Research in Policy Change

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Special Issue Editors: Mariah Kornbluh and Jennifer Renick

“It is a fundamental right of youth and young adults to participate in designing the programs and policies aiming to serve them.” (United Nations, 1989).

In recent years, there have been growing calls for the ‘democratization’ of research evidence, which argues for broadening the kinds of evidence that is considered legitimate in informing practice and policy (Doucet, 2019; Kirkland, 2019; Wegemer & Renick, 2021). Within youth-led participatory action research (YPAR), youth conduct systematic research and generate evidence to draw on to advocate for policy and/or programmatic changes (Kornbluh, 2023; Ozer et al., 2020). Such an approach aligns with the push for the democratization of evidence in broadening who are considered legitimate producers of knowledge (Fine & Torre, 2021; Ozer et al., 2020).

This special issue will explore the intersections between the use of research evidence to inform policy and YPAR, with the broad goals of studying and strengthening models for impact. In this special issue, we seek scholarship in theoretical frameworks, methodologies, presentations, and case studies that embrace YPAR as a vehicle for youth-led policy change. 

Submission for this issue might address the following topics:

  • Descriptive case studies of YPAR informing (or attempting to push for) policy change 
  • Theoretical models and approaches to YPAR-initiated policy change
  • An examination of the role of power and politics in relation to youth-led policy change
  • Examples of strategizing for scaling-up action from YPAR projects into policy change
  • Practices or procedures for addressing adultism and/or preparing adults to accept and implement youth-led policy change
  • Empirical explorations of the impact of YPAR-initiated policy change 

We imagine this special issue to function as a way to explore the research to practice gap within policy change, and whose perspectives are missing. Furthermore, we hope this issue will highlight ways in which policy makers can more critically accept or invite the voices of young people. 

Deadline: Interested authors should send a 300-word abstract to Special Issue Editors Dr Mariah Kornbluh at the University of Oregon (mkornbl2@uoregon.edu) and Dr Jennifer Renick at the University of Memphis (jrenick@memphis.edu) by 30 November 2024. Invitations for full paper submissions will be sent in mid-January, and full papers will be due by end of May 2025.

Who do teachers turn to in times of political trauma?

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Mariah Kornbluh, Amanda Davis, Alyssa Hadley Dunn and Kristina Brezicha

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Exploring the role of evidence-based educational resources and brokering in the wake of political trauma’.

On 6th January 2021, thousands of people descended upon the US Capitol to disrupt the counting of electoral votes in the US presidential election. Televised acts of physical violence were broadcast across the nation and many children were watching. Within hours of the attack, educators were ‘floundering’, trying to figure out if and how they would discuss what happened with their students the next day. Take for example, a Social Studies Subject Coordinator in Florida:

Kids come into school looking for answers. What does that mean? I’m like, ‘alright, what do we got?’ Because teachers were going to come to me, and I feel it was important that as a district person, we provide support. My superintendent said, ‘we’re not mentioning it.’ I was like, ‘We gotta do something, we gotta do something. If we just put out a statement. What is, what is the role of the Vice President? And why did we do that on January sixth?’ It was a teachable moment.

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Evidence & Policy Call for Papers – Special Issue on Research (Mis)use and Mis/Disinformation in and around Education

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Special Issue Editors: Joel Malin and Chris Lubienski

Mis- and dis-information are growing problems world-wide, corrupting trust and engagement in consumer markets, media, politics, and other institutions. This issue is particularly concerning for research-driven areas that involve public policy. Education is a prime area. Not only do education policymakers seek ‘research-based’ policy, but schools themselves, while subjected to false information campaigns, are also uniquely suited as institutions that have the capacity to counter misinformation by providing fact-based learning and critical thinking skills.

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