Watch a 1.5 minute video clip (Real Video 428kb or 1.2mb)

Listen to an extract (Windows Media 207kb) or the whole interview (Windows Media 758kb, 6 mins)

I am from Thailand. I run the Thailand Research and Development Institute, which is an independent development policy research institute. The issue of bridging research and policy is key to my own institute because we do policy research but we are not part of government, so the question of how to get research to have some impact on the way that the government sector formulates or implements its policy is critical. The experience that we have is that you need to get the two sides working together as a team. It is not so much that the researchers simply produce the research and then submit it to the policy-makers, but rather that you need to bring the policy-makers in at the beginning so that when the product is finished, there is a sense of ownership on the part of government officials - that the ideas and recommendations from the research are actually their own. The last thing that government officials want is to look like they do not know anything and need to wait for academics or researchers to come and tell them that this is what they should be doing. If they have ownership of the research, they can use the ideas in their own day-to-day work. This is probably one of the most effective ways of influencing policy.

We work with planning agencies and it does not do any good to write a report on what the direction of the country should be for the next five years and simply hand it to them. It is their job to be the ones thinking about the direction and problems of the country, so we do projects which work with them on some technical aspects of the plan. We look at what the key issues are at that point and sometimes we also provide the tools or techniques which they themselves can use, for example to make projections about economic development or to look at the interactions between population and development. It is more of a partnership and in this situation, I think it is important that researchers should not try to claim it as purely their own or to take too high a profile, because in that case you defeat the purpose of having the other side also take ownership of it. This is a more effective approach in the long term.

Governments also need to adjust the way that they look at researchers. Often the government has already made up its mind about the policy which it wants to carry out and it wants to involve researchers simply so that they give their blessing to the policy as the right approach. Governments should not be thinking of research in this way. Instead they should say that they would like to do something in a particular way, but give researchers room not to agree entirely with what the government had in mind at the beginning. Usually, what you find is that there is a sufficient overlap. Perhaps eighty percent of what the government wanted to begin with is confirmed by independent research. For the other twenty percent, they need to be willing to admit that these areas may need more thinking or need to be redefined. In this way, I think that you benefit from the research.

If as a researcher you simply become a rubber stamp, within a very short time your credibility will disappear and you cannot maintain your profession. The government needs to allow enough room for research to provide an independent cross-check. In many countries you find that the government does not have enough checks and balances. This is dangerous since they may be moving in the wrong direction without sufficient cross-checks which could tell them that they need to realign their direction a bit.

Researchers need to adjust the most. The reason is that within the research community, you build your reputation on the sense of ownership. You write your paper and publish it with your name on it. When you work with policy-makers you have to downplay that in order to create a sense of ownership. Also, researchers tend to come from universities. Sometimes they look at bureaucrats as their students. Many of them may have been their former students, but looking at them in this way is not productive. If you want to have partnership, you need to put each side on an equal basis. If researchers understand that, it is not so difficult for them to make the adjustment in order to create a sense of equal partnership and co-ownership in the ideas which come out of the research.

Back to Talking Heads interview list