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.
What happens to a piece of evidence once it enters a government department and how is it used in the policymaking process? We know that an important role for civil servants is to structure and present information about policy problems, solutions and risks to political appointees so that they can decide how to proceed. But while research has been conducted on civil servants’ personal attitudes towards evidence and their capacities for utilising research findings, there has been much less analysis of what those civil servants do on a daily basis and how much of their work is about informing policymaking with evidence.
Our Evidence & Policy paper reports on what we found in the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra: http://www.defra.gov.uk), based on 25 interviews with mid-level and senior policy officials between 2019 and 2021. We wanted to understand what their daily work consisted of as it related to using evidence, and what that meant for how evidence was used in Defra’s policymaking processes. Researchers often think of knowledge brokering as something that needs to be done to get knowledge to the policy process, but we wanted to know whether knowledge brokering could also happen inside policymaking to improve evidence use.
Being an effective knowledge broker relies on there being a separation between ‘evidence roles’ and ‘policy roles’ so that those in evidence roles can maintain their autonomy. We found this separation in Defra because across the UK Civil Service there is a clear distinction between the roles of ‘policymakers’, the civil servants working on the legislative aspects of the policymaking process, and those of ‘scientists’ and ‘analysts’ (collectively known in Defra as ‘evidence specialists’), the civil servants who are responsible for the evidence base.
Defra’s evidence specialists, particularly those embedded within the policy teams, acted as knowledge brokers in various ways, from commissioning evidence to answering specific policy questions (the ‘informing’ function in our analytical framework) to building relationships with people in other teams, in other government departments and internationally (‘relational’ work). However, much of their work consisted of ‘framing’ policy debates with evidence: from using evidence to help Defra develop its strategic purposes through to more granular work such as challenging the logic of theories of change or using evidence to refine how policy outcomes were defined. Many more examples of how they acted as knowledge brokers are given in our paper.
Knowledge brokering is often thought of as a function that transmits evidence to the policymaking process. But our research shows that – where there is a formal separation between evidence and policy roles – it can be just as important within policymaking. There is a great deal more research that could be done on this topic: in other countries there may not be the same separation between evidence roles and policy roles, and therefore civil servants might not act as brokers in the same way. However, better understanding the range of possibilities for internal brokering activities could help policy officials reflect on the practicalities of using evidence inside the policy process.
Researchers have a lot to offer here but need to be cautious about referring to all civil servants as ‘policymakers’. If academic research is to be of practical benefit to governments, researchers need to be clear about the roles and mandates of the civil servants they connect to, using the latters’ terminology where appropriate. Internal knowledge brokers inside government departments could help academics achieve this clarity and understanding.
Image credit: Photo by Uriel SC on Unsplash
Louise Shaxson is a PhD student at Kingston University but has spent the past 20 years working in the UK and internationally to develop practical approaches for improving evidence use inside government departments and for strengthening research-policy interactions. She has published in Evidence & Policy (2005, 2024), Public Money and Management (2019, 2024) and extensively in the non-academic literature.
Rick Hood is Professor of Social Work at Kingston University, UK. His research focuses on the relationship between social inequalities and the organisation and delivery of children’s social care services, and their implication for social care practice.
Annette Boaz is Professor of Health and Social Care and Director of the UK NIHR Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. She has more than 25 years of experience in supporting the use of evidence across a range of policy domains. She was a Founding Editor of the Journal Evidence & Policy and has undertaken an international leadership role in promoting the use of evidence.
Brian Head is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Queensland, Australia. He previously worked in government and in the community sector. His recent books include Wicked Problems in Public Policy (2022, Palgrave) and Reconsidering Policy (2020, Policy Press, co-authored).
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Shaxson, L. Hood, R. Boaz, A. & Head, B. (2024). Knowledge brokering inside the policy making process: an analysis of evidence use inside a UK government department. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2024D000000028.
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