Month: January 2024

Breaking the Overton Window: on the need for adversarial co-production

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Matthew Johnson, Elliott Johnson, Irene Hardill and Daniel Nettle

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Breaking the Overton Window: on the need for adversarial co-production’

Co-production has emerged as one of the key concepts in understanding knowledge-policy interactions and is associated with involvement of users of public services in their design and delivery. At a time of permacrisis, in which ever increasing numbers of Britons are exposed to financial insecurity, the need for transformative evidence-based policymaking is urgent and great. This is particularly important in highly distressed ‘left-behind’ communities targeted by the UK Government for Levelling Up, which constitutes an attempt to improve the infrastructural, economic, social and health environments of less affluent parts of the UK.

Often, policymakers regard the transformative policies capable of addressing these crises as beyond the ‘Overton Window’, which describes a range of policies in the political centre that are acceptable to the public. This window of opportunity can shift to encompass different policies, but movement is slow and policymakers generally believe that significant change lies outside it. This creates an Overton Window-based roadblock in evidence-based policymaking.

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Science communication poses barriers in Congress for evidence-based policymaking, but less so for science and engineering fellows

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K. L. Akerlof, Maria Carmen Lemos, Emily T. Cloyd, Erin Heath, Selena Nelson, Julia Hathaway and Kristin M. F. Timm

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Science communication in Congress: for what use?’

A new model published in Evidence & Policy explains the factors that enable and constrain science communication in the U.S. Congress. We depict how the use of scientific information is most often called upon to support established positions, as opposed to formulating new policies, and that this changes the nature of the barriers to science communication. We studied this in the context of two types of Congressional staff: 1) science and engineering fellows who spend a year serving primarily in the personal offices of members (hereafter referred to as fellows), and 2) the legislative staff with whom they work. We found that fellows serving on the Hill experience fewer barriers to use of scientific information than legislative staff, which suggests the importance of scientific fluency for building congressional capacity.

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