When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we wanted to use our skills to help with the eventual vaccine rollout. Chris was already well-placed to do so. As Chair of Australia’s Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), he had years of experience in aspects of vaccine policymaking. Katie was an emerging leader in vaccination social science and policy, and, like Chris, she had strong connections in the Western Australian Department of Health. They knew that the team focused on administering Australia’s National Immunisation Program would have their hands full with supporting the existing programme during COVID-19 times. How could they also prepare for a pandemic vaccine rollout?
Policy engagement is both a condition and moral obligation of publicly funded research projects in many countries, and our case in South Africa was no different. It was just relatively difficult.
In 2019 we won a UKRI grant to do participatory research on how people living in poor settlements in Cape Town experience and respond to the climate-related hazards of water scarcity, floods and fires. The idea was to work closely with affected community members in understanding how they coped with these disasters, and what they thought could be done better in the future, by themselves and with help from others. We discussed our experiences in our recent article in Evidence and Policy, and summarise some of them here.
These community participants then presented their experiences and ideas for climate resilience as ‘best bets’ to government officials in a series of deliberative workshops.
The number of academic papers written about advice and policymaking increased following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. When this kind of scholarship boom happens, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. In our Evidence & Policy paper, ‘Policy advisory bodies during crises: a scoping review of the COVID-19 literature in Europe’, we clarify what actually came out of this new scholarship. We focus on the structures that formally provided policy advice to European governments during the pandemic, such as government agencies, ad hoc taskforces and research institutes.
Our review spanned 981 academic outputs published between 2020 and 2023. The review protocol follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. In the end, a corpus of 59 publications informed our findings.. Our corpus was mostly composed of qualitative studies, studies about the UK and Sweden, and studies that examined the first half of 2020. We found that the academic community has mostly focused on advisory body composition, body structure and the advisory process.
Policy to Research (P2R) Fellowship programmeshave been found toforge connections and relationships between policymakers and researchers in academia and beyond, develop skills and knowledge among policymakers and researchers and can develop collaborative projects.
In our Evidence and Policy paper, we found 24 P2R Policy Fellowship programmes to study, from the UK, Europe and North America. The cost of providing these fellowships was estimated at around £5,000 per Policy Fellow, which is comparable to, or in some cases less than other methods for academic-policy engagement (e.g. workshops, training, Research to Policy Fellowships, funding research collaborations). More evaluations are needed to understand the role these Fellowships can play in developing the evidence-for-policy system.
When it comes to furthering the reach of scientific evidence in policymaking processes, a large body of research has shown just how crucial personal relationships between researchers and policymakers can be. These personal relationships can help offset the overloading workload of policymakers and their staffers, especially considering they often rely on trusted sources for advice and information. However, there are often group norms, systemic differences, and other obstacles standing in the way of relationships between policymakers and researchers initially forming.
Equity, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)[1] in the world of Higher Education, public policy and everything in between has received increasing attention over the past few years especially. Within academic-policy engagement specifically, key actors have identified the need to diversify participation and knowledges (Morris et al, 2021; Hopkins et al, 2021; Walker et al, 2019). Additionally, Oliver et al (2022) reported that there is currently a ‘busy but rudderless mass of activity’ within knowledge mobilisation, and called for further practice that is informed by ‘existing evidence and theory’ (694). Notwithstanding the high level of activity, a gap in understanding what EDI in the context of academic-policy engagement really means still exists. Alongside this, there is a gap in understanding and knowing how EDI is understood and experienced by knowledge brokers, how university knowledge brokers drive it, and what strategies are being used to ensure EDI is embedded within academic-policy engagement activities (and what it even means to do this!).
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.
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.
Special Issue Editors: Mariah Kornbluh and Jennifer Renick
“It is a fundamental right of youth and young adults to participate in designing the programs and policies aiming to serve them.” (United Nations, 1989).
In recent years, there have been growing calls for the ‘democratization’ of research evidence, which argues for broadening the kinds of evidence that is considered legitimate in informing practice and policy (Doucet, 2019; Kirkland, 2019; Wegemer & Renick, 2021). Within youth-led participatory action research (YPAR), youth conduct systematic research and generate evidence to draw on to advocate for policy and/or programmatic changes (Kornbluh, 2023; Ozer et al., 2020). Such an approach aligns with the push for the democratization of evidence in broadening who are considered legitimate producers of knowledge (Fine & Torre, 2021; Ozer et al., 2020).
This special issue will explore the intersections between the use of research evidence to inform policy and YPAR, with the broad goals of studying and strengthening models for impact. In this special issue, we seek scholarship in theoretical frameworks, methodologies, presentations, and case studies that embrace YPAR as a vehicle for youth-led policy change.
Submission for this issue might address the following topics:
Descriptive case studies of YPAR informing (or attempting to push for) policy change
Theoretical models and approaches to YPAR-initiated policy change
An examination of the role of power and politics in relation to youth-led policy change
Examples of strategizing for scaling-up action from YPAR projects into policy change
Practices or procedures for addressing adultism and/or preparing adults to accept and implement youth-led policy change
Empirical explorations of the impact of YPAR-initiated policy change
We imagine this special issue to function as a way to explore the research to practice gap within policy change, and whose perspectives are missing. Furthermore, we hope this issue will highlight ways in which policy makers can more critically accept or invite the voices of young people.
Deadline: Interested authors should send a 300-word abstract to Special Issue Editors Dr Mariah Kornbluh at the University of Oregon (mkornbl2@uoregon.edu) and Dr Jennifer Renick at the University of Memphis (jrenick@memphis.edu) by 30 November 2024. Invitations for full paper submissions will be sent in mid-January, and full papers will be due by end of May 2025.
On 6th January 2021, thousands of people descended upon the US Capitol to disrupt the counting of electoral votes in the US presidential election. Televised acts of physical violence were broadcast across the nation and many children were watching. Within hours of the attack, educators were ‘floundering’, trying to figure out if and how they would discuss what happened with their students the next day. Take for example, a Social Studies Subject Coordinator in Florida:
Kids come into school looking for answers. What does that mean? I’m like, ‘alright, what do we got?’ Because teachers were going to come to me, and I feel it was important that as a district person, we provide support. My superintendent said, ‘we’re not mentioning it.’ I was like, ‘We gotta do something, we gotta do something. If we just put out a statement. What is, what is the role of the Vice President? And why did we do that on January sixth?’ It was a teachable moment.
Evidence & Policy Blog 