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I am at the University of Oslo in Norway. I was Director of the Centre for Development and Environment there for nine years. My experience of bridging research and policy would vary across the different areas which I have been involved in. I started out as a consultant and part of the reason for giving up that role was the unsatisfactory relationship between research and policy. My last consultancy project for the UN in Egypt involved a team of thirty people producing a report that was so large that you could hardly pick it up. It was the last chapter which was about implementation and it was clearly impossible to implement the proposals contained in the report. This brought it home to me rather strongly that if you do not start with implementation, no matter how good the research or the information which goes into it, it will not be very helpful at the end of the day.

I moved on to advisory work for the government of Sri Lanka for a few years and a similar message came through. I was working for one of the most powerful Ministers and I noticed that every day the Principal Secretary got a huge stack of papers and if anything needed turning over, he gave it to someone else. At the end of my day when I had to write a report to him, I decided that I had better write it all on one page.

Teaching, both in a more conventional sense and running in-country courses, was in many ways the most rewarding in terms of capacity building and perhaps even in terms of changing policy. We had a project in Jordan where our training materials were determined on the basis of what they had on their desks. We would look at what they were working on and design a training course which used that, so it fitted in directly with what they were doing. In a sense, it was too effective, because firstly we were training middle-level people who then became too smart for their bosses who then hurriedly required training, and then the institution itself in a sense became too smart because they started asking questions which were too difficult for the government to answer. This brought home to me the political element in these sorts of activities.

More recently I have been doing research on the relationship between research and policy. If you take global examples of the relationship between research and policy, it is useful to contrast the issue of CFCs with the issue of global warming. In each case there was a lot of research and in one case it resulted an appropriate policy response largely solving the problem and in the other it did not. This does not seem to be a reflection of the research. In fact, the research seemed to be a rather minor issue, since the problem was not that the research itself was contested, but that the policy implications were contested. In the case of global warming, the research is largely contested because people will not accept the policy implications. Another example which is more from the development field can be seen in contrasting case studies from the World Bank. The World Bank rapidly took up the idea of social capital, which came out of political science research in Italy, and adapted it for its own policy. You could debate how far the idea has been distorted in the process, or genuinely integrated into policy, but there is no doubt that the idea of social capital and the research on which it is based has had a significant impact. You could contrast that with the highly contested East Asian miracle study, where the World Bank, under pressure from Japan, produced a research report on the East Asian miracle. Both the research itself and the implications of that research were highly contested. This was not so much a reflection of the quality of the research as a reflection of its acceptability and how far it fitted the current World Bank agenda.

Researchers need to understand that policy-makers, especially if they are important, have very little time. Researchers who are interested in influencing policy have to be able to produce research which can be summarised on one piece of paper. That may sound horrific to many researchers but I think that they have to accept that as the reality.

If researchers come to policy-makers and say that they are asking the wrong question, policy-makers should take that very seriously. If as a policy-maker you already know exactly what the question is, you probably do not need research. You may need a consultant to brush out the details.

The last point has to be that researchers and policy-makers need to interact, and that both need to recognise that there is a difference and perhaps even a conflict between the imperatives driving researching and policy. Policy-makers need research that is simple and which can be put into operation. Researchers are motivated by and interested in making life complex, finding interesting nuances and challenging the conventional wisdom. Those are very different things. At the very least, the product that the researcher produces will be very different for policy-makers compared with an academic audience. It may be that the researcher is not able to produce those two different products. It is important to recognise the different imperatives between those two different domains and that some people may be able and willing to cross those domains but they have to accept the premises of the other party.

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