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The link between research and policy is of great current interest, to
researchers, policy-makers and donors. The key questions are: how can
policy-makers best use research, and move towards evidence-based policy-making;
how can researchers best use their findings in order to influence policy;
and how can the interaction between researchers and policy-makers be improved?
These issues are central to ODI’s mission, and the Institute has
been developing a programme on research-policy linkages over the last
few years. A literature review published in 1999 identified and described
theoretical approaches in political science, sociology, anthropology,
international relations and management, and provided a 21-point checklist
of what makes policies happen.
Since then ODI has been involved in the development of the Bridging Research
and Policy theme within the Global Development Network, including contributions
to sessions at the GDN Annual Conference in Tokyo in November 2000, co-organising
an international workshop in Warwick in July 2001 and developing, and
coordinating the first year of GDN’s US$ 3 million Bridging Research
and Policy research project.
In August 2002, ODI completed a new literature review incorporating the
latest research from disciplines covered in the Sutton paper, and including
emerging ideas from research on campaigns and communications, and published
a Working Paper describing a framework for analysing research-policy linkages.
Over the next few months, ODI will use this
framework to analyse three case-studies of policy change:
- Poverty Reduction Strategies.
How, during 1999, the international discourse about the Common
Development Framework became linked to the adoption of the Enhanced
HIPC framework by the G8, and then translated into the process
of preparing the first interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.
What happened in between? Who influenced whom, on what and how?
What was the specific contribution of research-based knowledge,
and what conditions enabled this influence to be exercised in
such a striking way?
- Humanitarian Aid. One of the
most significant policy shifts in the international humanitarian
sector in the last decade has been the move to strengthen the
accountability of humanitarian agencies and to find ways of improving
performance in humanitarian response. One of the key policy initiatives,
representative of this shift, was the decision to launch the Sphere
project in 1996, in the wake of the much-criticised international
humanitarian response to the Rwanda crisis. Sphere resulted in
the publication of a ‘Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards
for Disaster Response’ in 2000. This case study will explore
the process that led up to this policy initiative. For example,
how significant was the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance
to Rwanda? What were the other key factors that triggered the
launching of Sphere? How significant was the policy context, in
which humanitarian agencies were subject to harsh and public criticism?
- Livestock Services. Livestock
services have long been regarded as an easy target for reform
and privatisation, first under structural adjustment programmes
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and more recently, as part
of re-orientating agricultural services under poverty reduction
strategies. Veterinarians and governments in most countries, however,
have been very reluctant to liberalise the policy framework to
allow private and especially para-professional services to flourish,
despite good evidence that paravets can provide an effective,
cost-efficient, and safe service. This research will seek to identify
the critical factors and the relevance of research in the evolving
livestock service policies particularly in Eastern, and the Horn
of Africa.
The results of these case studies will be discussed, along with examples
of similar research in other UK Development Research Institutes and Think
Tanks, in a conference towards the end of the year.
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