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This workshop for researchers from government research departments,
universities or research institutes, think tanks and NGOs
in the Middle East and North Africa Region was designed to
improve participants’ capacity to analyse the context
within which they work, develop strategies and use some simple
approaches and tools to improve the policy impact of their
work.
After introductions, the first session focused on participants’
own examples of where research has influenced policy and where
it has not. This was followed by group work to discuss some
of the general issues that affect research-policy linkages
in the region. They concluded that:
- different stakeholder groups – researchers, policy
makers and NGOs, each have their own cultures, incentives,
interests and agendas, and have complex inter-relationships;
- the political context provides major challenges regarding
the uptake of research into policy in the MENA region
- policy makers in the region change frequently, are driven
by political agendas, rarely recognize the value of research,
prefer “foreign” research, are often looking for
evidence to support policy decisions they have already made,
and often co-opt the best researchers;
- research in the region suffers from variable data quality,
inadequate peer review, poor research methodology, (lack
of) independence, weak infrastructure and perverse incentives;
- there are severe communication challenges in the region
between academic and policy communities and civil society
and government etc.
The ODI framework groups the factors affecting research-policy
interactions into 4 domains: the external context (donor policies
etc), the political context (politics, policy-making institutions
and existing narratives etc), the evidence itself (credibility,
relevance, and applicability etc), and the links between evidence
and policy-making (individuals, intermediaries and networks
etc). Building on this, participants identified the key factors
relevant for their own work in each domain:
- Political context: In the MENA region policy makers
are very conservative, there is little demand for research
and little interest in policy research among researchers.
Most policy is set by the Head of State, who likes to have
academics as Ministers to validate his policy initiatives.
When academics become Ministers they tend to lose their
independence.
- Evidence: Research could play a larger role. More
research is needed into policy implementation. In many countries,
Ministries have their own research departments, often staffed
by part-time academics, but their advice is often ignored.
- Links: Researchers and policy-makers live in different
worlds and use different sorts of language. Policy-makers
need simple short stories, researchers like complicated
theories. Few researchers make sufficient efforts to communicate
the results of their work to policy-makers. The media plays
an important role in some countries.
The framework can also help researchers to decide what they
need to know, and do, and how to do it
to achieve greater impact. They need a wide range of skills
- storytelling, networking, planning (engineers) and political
skills (fixers). Based on questionnaire results, most of the
participants preferred story telling and networking to planning
and fixing.
Participants used 3 teaching case studies (on Paravets in
Kenya, Rice production in Kerala, and Fiscal policy in Chile)
to see how applying the framework could help to promote policy
impact. It was interesting how different people thought different
issues were important, but all very quickly started to think
about the value of multidisciplinary research, how to network,
how to analyse the political context, and what strategies
were likely to be most successful. A range of other useful
tools was also presented.
During the final concluding session participants suggested
that some of these tools and approaches would be very helpful
in the MENR region and that the ERF should do more on these
issues.
Click here for the full
report.
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