Bridging Research and Policy

This paper is about the relationship between research and policy - specifically about how research impacts on policy, and about how policy draws on research. It might be thought that the relationship is straightforward, with good research designed to be relevant to policy, and its results delivered in an accessible form to policy-makers - and with good policy-making securely and rationally based on relevant research findings. In fact, this is far from the case. As a taster, Box 1 gives ten reasons why the link from research to policy might not be straightforward.

Sometimes research is not designed to be relevant to policy. Sometimes it is so designed, but fails to have an impact because of problems associated with timeliness, presentation, or manner of communication. Sometimes (probably quite often) policy-makers do not see research findings as central to their decision-making. The relationship between research and policy is often tenuous, quite often fraught.

To observe as much is not new. There are literatures on the question in many social science disciplines - in political science, sociology, anthropology, and management, to name a few. Our purpose here is to review some of these literatures and to draw out the implications for both researchers and policy-makers. The starting point is a discussion of what is meant by 'policy' and the 'policy process'. The rational, linear model of policy-making - which summarises a logical sequence from problem definition, through analysis of alternatives, to decision, implementation, and review - is the traditional approach. We will see shortly what is wrong with this. Accordingly, the paper begins (Section 2) with a brief review of thinking on policy, presenting alternative models, and setting out a framework for thinking about the interaction between research and policy. It then deals successively with the challenge facing researchers (Section 3) and policy-makers (Section 4). Can the range of advice already offered to researchers be extended? And can policy-makers be helped by new ideas such as evidence-based policy-making and performance-based evaluations? The Conclusion (Section 5) draws these threads together, suggesting that the impact of research is uncertain and contingent on social and political context.

[Introduction taken from paper]