John Young and Sara Gwynn
Transcript of a presentation at the ODI/INASP Research-Policy Symposium, Oxford, November 16th/17th 2006.

Welcome and an introduction to the Research-Policy Symposium. A brief overview of ODI/RAPID's and INASP's work

Why are some policies clearly based on evidence and others not? How can we promote more evidence-based policies? This subject is of increasing interest to policy-makers, and here in the UK there has been a big emphasis on evidence-based policy under the Blair government. It is also of interest to practitioners in terms of how we can learn more effectively from what we are doing so that we can do our jobs better. It is of great interest to donors both to development programmes and to development research. So it really is a very important topic.

What we are focusing on today is the role of different sorts of intermediaries in that process and how the knowledge from research gets into the policy process. We have presentations today from lots of different types of intermediary and I will tell you a bit more about those in a minute. Tomorrow there will be a series of workshops.

We have speakers today from many different groups involved in the process. Most are associated in one way or another with either the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) or the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). There is also a growing community of academics and development professionals based in Oxford who are interested in these issues. We have three main communities here: ODI network members, INASP network members and other people in Oxford who are interested in this topic.

We have a great line-up of speakers today. In the first session we have Dr Tanveer Naim, who is a consultant and an advisor to the government of Pakistan in science and technology policy. Then, in complete contrast, we have Duncan Green from Oxfam, which is one of the most effective advocacy organisations in development policy. Oxfam is hugely influential on the ground and increasingly influential at the policy level. Then we have three presentations from people who are actually doing this: Nicolas Ducote from a think-tank in Argentina, Buhle Mbambo-Thata, who runs the library information services in the University of South Africa, and Dylan Winder who is responsible for communications in the UK Department for International Development, one of the largest donors in the world. After lunch we will have three case studies from people who are actually trying to do this, including stories about how it is done in practice, the trials and tribulations involved and some of the successes and failures. These stories will be compered by Tony Dogbe from Ghana, who is one of the major advocates of participatory approaches to development in Ghana. Then we will have an open mic session of around an hour to discuss issues and comments which have come up during the day. Andrew Barnett will try to pull all of this together at the end of the day.

I will now hand over to Sara Gwynn who will talk a little bit about the INASP side of this. Then I will say something about the ODI side of this before handing over to our speakers.

Sarah Gwynn

Thank you very much and welcome to Oxford. Our initial discussion with ODI about this symposium was a short one, because it became very clear very quickly that our communities matched well and linked closely in this area, and that this would be a great opportunity for these communities and networks to come together, exchange experience, learn and hopefully collaborate in the future.

ODI's and INASP's work clearly overlaps and links. INASP's focus is on enabling sustainable and equitable development. We work with partners and networks around the world to encourage the creation and production of information, to promote sustainable and equitable access to information, to foster collaboration and networking, and to strengthen local capacities to manage and use information and knowledge. Clearly, this links with ODI's work as the information and knowledge which is created needs to feed effectively into policy processes as well as practice. So the work that INASP does in the information field links closely into ODI's work on research and policy.

Yesterday INASP hosted a meeting and we had colleagues with us from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America, and I am pleased to see many of them here today. We were very fortunate to be able to gather together key actors who are working in information support and enabling people to access and contribute to information. We had a group of representatives from university libraries, research institutes and networks, publishers (both international and local), government ministries and academic IT networks. One of the main themes of our discussion, which came up repeatedly, was the issue of advocacy and the need for information and knowledge to get into policy - to be used and useful. It is very gratifying that within 24 hours of those suggestions about how we need to work and the need to work with other groups in that broader area, we now have an opportunity to start working together on that.

So, I will keep it very brief. I just want to say thank you very much for your time in coming to the workshops and the symposium and for your contributions to it. We recognise that we are fortunate to have all these people gathered here and, of course, to be working with you over the next two days and hopefully beyond that. So thank you very much.

John Young

I will just briefly tell you something about ODI. ODI stands for the Overseas Development Institute. ODI has been around for nearly fifty years. It does research on a very wide range of policy issues. It actually calls itself a think-tank rather than a research institute because it does three different things at the same time: it does research, it does advisory work and it does public affairs. So ODI's work is really about doing some basic research and then seeking ways to ensure that the results of that research are made use of by policy-makers and practitioners.

At ODI, we work on a very wide range of topics. We have a rural group, an international economic group, a humanitarian group and a rural policy and environment group. All of those groups, if you like, work on the policy context of the work. They are looking at policy questions in those sectoral areas. There is also another group at ODI, which I run, called RAPID, which stands for Research and Policy in Development. What we look at is not the policy context, but rather how the results of research in those areas get into policy and practice. Like other parts of ODI, we do research on this topic, we also do advisory work for a range of organisations and we do some public affairs work, and I suppose this is an example of some of the public affairs work that we do in that area.

Within RAPID, we attempt to work with a whole range of stakeholders involved in this process. We have not yet started to work with parliamentarians and with legislators, but we would like to. We have done some work with bureaucrats, both in development agencies and in developing countries and we have done quite a lot of work with researchers all over the world as well.

Our primary focus over the past two years has been on working with civil society actors who are involved in this process. We have a programme called the Civil Society Partnerships Programme (CSPP) that has been developing a network, and it is that network which has started to overlap with the INASP network, which is why we thought it would be useful to bring these two communities together. Many of these people are working in the same countries, but coming at it from slightly different sides. The ODI network people tend to be coming at it from a research or an operational side, whereas the INASP people tend to be coming from an information provision side. We are meeting in the middle in that area where knowledge is translated into policy and practice.

So I will echo what Sara said: this is a great opportunity for these two communities to meet. In RAPID, we have also been locked away in meetings over the past few days, developing our programme for the next year or two, and one of the things that came out of our discussions was the need to interact more with other agencies. So, again, we can tick that box at the end of these two days.