Month: September 2022

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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Increasing the reach of science using tailored and targeted messages

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Taylor Scott and Jessica Pugel

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Cutting through the noise during crisis by enhancing the relevance of research to policymakers’.

We know that policymakers are most likely to use research evidence when the evidence fits what they need at that time, and that email is a cost-effective way of sharing such research. But researchers aren’t the only ones in legislators’ inboxes – constituents and special interest groups also seek out legislators’ attention and their inboxes. Thus, we need to understand how to better reach legislators with science so that we can cut through the noise and provide trustworthy research evidence at the right time. This is especially true during moments of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when our study occurred, ‘Cutting through the noise during crisis by enhancing the relevance of research to policymakers’.

Although the literature theorises that policymakers use research they deem as timely and personally relevant, there has been a lack of practical strategies for improving perceived relevance. Through four experimental trials with US legislators across four issue areas (COVID-19, violence, exploitation and policing), we found support for one such strategy: including the legislators’ name or state/district name in the subject line. In three of the four trials, tailored emails were engaged with more often.

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What is ‘evidence’? What is ‘policy’? Conceptualising the terms and their connections

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Sonja Blum and Valérie Pattyn

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘How are evidence and policy conceptualised, and how do they connect? A qualitative systematic review of public policy literature’.

Are policies based on available evidence? Are academic experts willing to provide their expertise? What enables or constrains the effective use of evidence for policymaking?

Public policy scholarship has puzzled over such questions of the evidence and policy relationship for decades. Over time, ever more differentiated branches of public policy research have developed, which complement and enrich each other. However, they have also developed their own perspectives, languages, and understandings of ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections.

Such differences in terminology and employed concepts are more than ‘just words’. Rather, attentiveness to careful conceptualisations helps to set clear boundaries for theory development and empirical research, to avoid misunderstandings, and enable dialogue across different literatures. Against that backdrop, in our article published in Evidence & Policy, we conducted a qualitative systematic review of recent public policy scholarship with the aim to trace different conceptualisations of ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections. To be included in our review, the research articles needed to address some sort of evidence, some sort of policy, and had to deal with some sort of connection between the two (a list of all included research articles is available online). The review followed all steps of the PRISMA methodology.

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Call for papers: Evidence & Policy special issue ‘Learning from failure in knowledge exchange’

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Rationale and scope:

While the evidence base on successful practices in knowledge exchange is rapidly growing, much less attention has been given in the academic literature to documenting and reflecting on failures in trying to exchange different types of evidence between academics, practice partners and policy makers. However, learning from failures is just as important, if not more crucial, than celebrating successes.

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