Month: November 2022

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

evidencepolicyblogLeave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

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

evidencepolicyblogLeave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

Embracing creativity in co-production using the arts

evidencepolicyblogLeave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

Entrepreneurial thinking: achieving policy impact

evidencepolicyblogLeave a comment

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.

Continue reading →