The long game: understanding and maximising researchers’ policy engagement activities across career levels

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Alice Windle and Joanne Arciuli

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Research-policy engagement activities and research impact: nursing and health science researcher perspectives’.

There are many ways in which researchers try to influence policy using the evidence that they produce. Studies have examined such research-policy engagement activities in public health, but little is known about what nursing and health sciences researchers do to promote the impact of their research in terms of policy. Our Evidence and Policy article explores nursing and health sciences researchers’ experiences of activities to promote their research and influence policy, across different career stages. It also explored researchers’ perspectives on barriers and enablers to maximising policy engagement.

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Knowledge brokers in local policy spaces: early career researchers and dynamic ideas

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Sarah Weakley and David Waite

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Academic knowledge brokering in local policy spaces: negotiating and implementing dynamic idea types’.

It is now commonplace for many academics within higher education institutions to simultaneously take on the roles of both knowledge producers and knowledge brokers in policy spaces as part of their everyday working. In these roles at the intersection of the evidence and policy nexus, they undertake traditional research activities but also engage with policy actors using their research ideas and expertise to change conversations and develop solutions to policy problems. In our new article in Evidence and Policy, ‘Academic knowledge brokering in local policy spaces: negotiating and implementing dynamic idea types’, we reflect on how ideas move within local policy spaces and the hands that move them. We considered this issue in the context our own work with local bodies in two different policy arenas – one looking at social recovery after Covid-19 and one focussed on socioeconomic change.

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Embracing creativity in co-production using the arts

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Stephen MacGregor, Amanda Cooper, Michelle Searle and Tiina Kukkonen

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Co-production and arts-informed inquiry as creative power for knowledge mobilisation’, part of the Special Issue on Creativity and Co-production.

The days of research reports going unread by all but their authors and articles being hidden behind publisher paywalls are giving way to more collaborative research approaches. One that has provoked great attention in recent years is co-production, an approach that acknowledges the unique knowledge and expertise different individuals can bring to the research process. However, the evidence base for co-production has not kept pace with the excitement surrounding it.

In our recent Evidence & Policy article, we asked, ‘How can seeing co-production as a creative endeavour create opportunities to move knowledge into action?’ To answer this question, we examined three cases focused on promoting shared understanding and action in the Canadian education sector. Each case used artful practices to promote meaningful reflection, understanding and representation of individual and communal experiences.

Unique to our study was the use of a realist perspective. Realist explanations look to develop reasoned pathways from specific mechanisms and contexts to observed outcomes (see Pawson & Tilley, 1997). Researchers typically refer to these as CMO configurations and represent the expression as: context + mechanism = outcome. These explanations are helpful because we can learn about the possibility of transferring lessons learned from one instance of co-production to another. What’s more, by comparing these CMO configurations across our three cases, we can identify common propositions about arts-informed approaches to co-production.

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Entrepreneurial thinking: achieving policy impact

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Matthew Flinders

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Entrepreneurial thinking: the politics and practice of policy impact’.

In a recent article in Evidence and Policy Steve Johnson suggests that entrepreneurship research may have had far more impact on society than it is generally credited with. In making this point Johnson stimulates a debate not just about the past, present and future of entrepreneurship research but about the science-society nexus more generally. In a commentary in Evidence and Policy I responded to Johnson’s argument through a focus on evidential standards and criticality.

When stripped down to its core thesis, Johnson’s argument is that entrepreneurship research may have had a number of non-academic and broadly positive impacts on society. The slight problem is that this claim relies upon enlightenment arguments about affecting public debate and shaping ideas that are incredibly hard to demonstrate or measure in a tangible manner. There are, of course, some academic studies that can claim and prove that they have shaped public discourse and affected public policy – the recent insights of behavioural economics and ‘nudge theory’ provide a good example – but such examples tend to be rare.

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Ethical expertise and pandemic governance: (how) did the UK government include ethical guidance in their COVID-19 response?

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Theresa Sommer, Sarah Ball and Jessica Pykett

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Ethical moments and institutional expertise in UK Government COVID-19 pandemic policy responses: where, when and how is ethical advice sought?’.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant challenges for governments, policy advisors and citizens alike. Wide-reaching and contentious decisions had to be made at a moment’s notice while evidence about the virus was scarce, and at times involved conflicting knowledge claims. Under these conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, questions have emerged about how values and ethical advice played roles in the decision-making process.

In our Evidence & Policy article, we look beyond the discussion of scientific advice and ask where, when and how ethical advice was sought. The article is based on documentary analysis of policy papers and documents published by UK government advisory committees and a workshop with UK government ethics advisors and researchers. Our analysis focuses on both the temporal and spatial dimensions of ethical advice during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. By asking when and how ethical advice was sought, we set out to account for the (changing) role of ethics and point out distinct ethical moments and stages of how ethics were taken into consideration.

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The changing culture of evidence use in local government

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Mandy Cheetham

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘What I really want is academics who want to partner and who care about the outcome’: findings from a mixed-methods study of evidence use in local government in England’.

Background

It is recognised that closer interaction between those working in policy and practice and academic researchers increases the likelihood of evidence being used to improve outcomes, but progress remains slow. Policymakers and researchers continue to be seen (unhelpfully) as occupying separate worlds, with limited research undertaken into efforts to address this perceived division.

In this blog post, we outline the main messages from a recently published article in Evidence & Policy, which draws on a collaborative, mixed methods study funded by the Health Foundation: Local Authority Champions of Research (LACoR). We explore evidence use in the context of local government from the perspectives of those who work there.

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Understanding organisations that provide evidence for policy

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Eleanor MacKillop and James Downe

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Knowledge brokering organisations: a new way of governing evidence’.

New organisations have emerged in different countries to help inform policymaking. Different from think tanks and academic research centres, these Knowledge Brokering Organisations (KBOs) attempt to influence policy by mobilising evidence. Our research examines how their origins and roles are rooted in politics, and explores their need to build credibility and legitimacy in their policy community. Despite examining KBOs on different continents – the Africa Centre for Evidence, the Mowat Centre in Canada and the Wales Centre for Public Policy – we show how they have become a tool mobilised in similar ways by their respective governments.

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Entrepreneurship research makes a difference to policy, despite appearances to the contrary

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Steve Johnson

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The policy impact of entrepreneurship research: challenging received wisdom’.

Conventional wisdom across the entrepreneurship research community is that policymakers take little notice of our research findings, preferring to follow the ideological inclinations and electoral ambitions of politicians and to take most notice of those who shout loudest. Policies are therefore not always evidence-based and as a result may not achieve their stated objectives.

This argument has some validity. There are many examples of research that questions the rationale for and impact of existing policies or makes policy recommendations that are subsequently rejected or ignored by policymakers. My recently published article in Evidence and Policy explores entrepreneurship research and policy in the UK over 30 years and finds that, despite appearances to the contrary, there are however grounds for optimism among those of us who believe that research can, does and should have some impact on policy.

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Meeting in brackets – how policy travels through meetings

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Sophie Thunus

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Meeting in brackets: how mental health policy travels through meetings’.

Meetings matter. They produce the policies for which they are organised. Yet meetings are taken for granted. We organise them, we participate in them, and we complain about them, especially when they do not achieve their purpose. However, we rarely question them: we continue to go to meetings that seem ineffective without asking why, and without wondering what these meetings might do to the policy process to which they relate, and to their participants.

The concept of meeting in brackets helps us to understand how meetings make policy. It has four implications, which have been derived from a multi-year sociological study of the implementation of a Belgian mental health policy.

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‘Non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation

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Adam Hannah, Jordan Tchilingirian, Linda Botterill and Katie Attwell

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The role of ‘non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: a proposal and agenda for future research’.

The ability to locate, comprehend, and discriminate between competing sources of knowledge is a major challenge for policymakers, particularly in times of crisis.

In our recent Evidence & Policy article, we argue that to better understand these ‘knowledge challenges’, policy scholarship should also consider ‘non-knowledge’. Examining non-knowledge involves investigating the strategies, practices and cultures that surround what is not known. Non-knowledge can result from genuine lack of knowledge or strategic avoidance.

Three forms of non-knowledge are most relevant for studies of public policy: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation.

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