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I am Chairman of the Bridging Research and Policy Project. There are a lot of issues which have come up in discussion. One of the interesting things to me is the differences which can exist in different situations, arising from the context in which research is done and the context in which policy-makers interact with research. You can have an entire spectrum of research which is essentially co-opted by policy-makers. This can be a good thing in so far as they want to have more input, but they are orchestrating the research input into policy themselves. Alternatively you can have an environment where there is research genuinely being done on the outside and impacting on the general debate which then impacts on policy-makers. Or you can have much more adversarial contexts where research is being done on opposite sides of the same question and that then informs the debate. One can imagine very positive outcomes from bridges being stronger in each of these different contexts. It will be interesting to see whether the researchers who are looking at individual projects throw light on what it is that makes research more useful in different typologies.

In the Indian context, which is closer to a more adversarial context where there is a high degree of participation in policy debate, one of the most important things is the ability of the researchers to impact on the debate directly. This may not mean seeking directly to have an impact on policy-makers, but rather to influence the debate so that people in the policy-making game - not only insiders but outsiders and including the government, the opposition and the opinion-makers etc. - can look at the research findings and put them somewhere on the horizon as being relevant to the policy issues. I think that the notion of research directly impacting policy, at least in the Indian context, is not the most important. I would view research as improving the policy debate generally, so that out of an improved policy debate, you will get more informed policy.

The role of research in policy-making organisations like the World Bank and IMF is very important because after all, these organisations are essentially in the business of providing finance and advice to countries about one aspect or another of development and how to move forward. They sometimes link their conditionality to one or another of these issues, so clearly whatever position they take needs to be well-grounded in research about the likely effects of policies. This advice is often very controversial as soon as you get down to any individual issue in any individual country, and it is very important for researchers to have a good understanding of the issues on both sides of the debate.

A lot of the debate on issues like globalisation and anti-globalisation revolves around differences of opinion about whether particular policies will have particular results. This is eminently researchable and in my view it is very important that the research community be as broad-based as possible. It is extremely important to build the research capacity in the developing countries. This is, after all, social science research and the credibility of the research is affected by whether or not it is perceived to be domestically grounded and responding to domestic perceptions. Something like the Global Development Network which encourages research in developing countries and creates linkages between researchers in one developing country and another developing country directly, without being intermediated by other international institutions, plays a very important role.

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