Month: July 2024

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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