Document(s) 5 of 22

New knowledge achieves influence in a dynamic interaction of research and policy. On one side of that interaction, the policy or the political setting shapes constraints and opportunities for researchers to do their work and to try to influence public policy. On the other side, research activity and discovery can alter the policy environment by creating new choices, framing new policy questions, and introducing new solutions to policy problems. Ultimately, research can affect the way government decisions are made. This is an interaction that benefits researchers and policymakers alike. For researchers, it means doing and disseminating development research that has real effects on public policy and action. For the policy community, it means having a ready supply of evidence-based options for timelier, stronger, and more responsive policy decisions.

At best, research is only one element in the fiercely complicated mix of factors and forces behind any significant governmental policy decision. Policies in most governments, most of the time, are the outcomes of all the bargains and compromises, beliefs and aspirations, and cross-purposes and double meanings of ordinary governmental decision making. This is why it is usually a mistake to adopt a model that imagines policymaking as a rational, orderly, or unitary and linear progression from problem to decision and solution. Close observation of how public policies are actually made and executed leads to a more complicated—but more realistic—picture of outcomes affected by personality, chance, imperfect understanding, and negotiation. To say that research has exerted an influence in a particular case is only to say that the influence of research has counted as one of numerous influences. The thread between cause and effect in a policy decision invariably gets tangled in the coalitions and contradictions of policy processes in any country. This is transparently true of democratic governments, and less transparently, but no less true, of dictatorships and oligarchies.

Furthermore, it is best to acknowledge that research itself is far from monolithic or single-minded. On the contrary, pure and applied research is conducted everywhere with very diverse intentions, motives, and expectations. These differences—along with the surprises that so often divert research into new directions—customarily carry researchers to inconsistent, and even contradictory findings and advice for policy. As a rule, these inconsistencies and contradictions in advice are not well received by policymakers. The dynamism of this research and policy interaction explains why influence is so hard to track and measure.

But what is influence? IDRC’s evaluation of development research projects around the world, in very different political contexts, confirmed three overall categories that describe how research can affect policy.

First, research can expand policy capacities. Research can strengthen the institutional framework supporting policymaking by enhancing the policy community’s own collective ability to assess and communicate innovative ideas, and by cultivating new talents for analyzing and applying incoming research advice.

Second, research can broaden policy horizons. Policy is often frustrated by a scarcity of choices. Research can improve the intellectual framework surrounding policymaking by introducing new ideas to the policy agenda, by ensuring that information comes to policymakers in a form and language they can quickly grasp and use, and by fostering helpful dialogue between researchers and decision makers. Researchers win the respect and gratitude of policymakers by providing new insight or information that can unlock those zero-sum, ‘either-or’ policy dichotomies that so often seem to constrict debate and decision.

Box 2.1: Three Kinds of Influence in Vietnam

Third, research can affect decision regimes. The quality of a policy can be determined as much by the procedures of deliberation and decision as by its content. Research findings can improve the policy-process framework by helping to open and rationalize the procedures of legislating, administering, and evaluating government policies and programmes. Skills and attitudes characteristic of good research—not least, a spirit of curiosity and fact-based argument—can improve the operations of government.

The crucial point about these three categories of influence is that they go well beyond changing particular policies. The most meaningful and lasting influence is less about specific policy change than about building capacity—among researchers and policy people—to produce and apply knowledge for better development results. This kind of influence can take years, or even decades, to take effect or become apparent. But it is no less important for that.

How do we know if a policy or decision has been influenced by research? It is never easy to tell with certainty. For all the reasons mentioned above, research is invariably only one of the forces affecting policy outcomes; attribution of causes to effects is likely to be conjectural except in rare cases. (This is one realm where it is usually easier to ‘prove’ the negative as there can be no visible influence by a given body of research on a given policy or action.) Still, as the evidence offered in the following pages will show, it is sometimes possible to trace the effects of research on policy debates and outcomes. Sometimes the evidence is remarkably straightforward: an affirmation from the policy community itself that research findings, that were well communicated, have seemed to open minds—if not change them—in favour of better decisions.

Regimes and Receptivity

Scholars of public administration and policy processes have invented an imposing diversity of types and classifications to describe how government decisions are made and enforced. For the practical purposes of getting research to policy, a three-part analytical scheme that has proved useful to researchers and policymakers is discussed below.

Routine decision regimes focus on matching and adapting existing programmes and policy repertoires to emerging demands. There is scant debate on overall policy design, and none on fundamental underlying principles or objectives.

Incremental decision regimes will debate options and values on selected issues as they emerge onto the policy agenda. But these regimes seldom engage in deeper questioning of choices when they can avoid it. And they evade, whenever possible, comprehensive re-examination of issues spanning the whole policy horizon. They advance carefully, in small steps.

Fundamental decision regimes embrace thorough-going and even radical reconsiderations of policies and strategies, not least when authorities want to give expression to revolutionary political change. South Africa’s first freely elected post-apartheid government is a case in point. Such regimes are relatively rare, but they present unique opportunities to researchers ready with timely and convincing advice.

This is not, of course, the only possible categorical scheme available. Another common and similar taxonomy divides government performance according to its overarching style: transactional, transitional, or transformational. In all these schemes, however, the truth to recall is that no government represents any such category in its pure state—or at least, not for long. Over time, most governments display more than one style as demands, personalities, and priorities arise and recede. Fundamental decision regimes, for instance, are often followed by quieter phases of incrementalist consolidation and implementation. Styles can merge and mutate, occasionally with surprising speed.

What matters, for policy research, is that the dominant style of government—the decision regime features that prevail at the relevant moment—will carry implications for the research to policy dynamic.

Routine decision regimes will be attracted to data, analysis, and prescriptions that reinforce or only slightly modify pre-existing policy preferences and routines. They are usually resistant to research that explicitly challenges their foundational assumptions and beliefs.

Incremental decision regimes will entertain policy propositions that identify alternatives and compromises for solving selected issues already on the policy agenda. They will not usually invite or welcome wholesale rethinking of existing policy or conventional wisdom. They want to address any big ideas in small pieces.

Fundamental decision regimes will be far more open to research and debate that challenges the logic and value assumptions of existing policy—especially if the regime is already committed to overturning existing policy. They are also typically readier to re-examine the whole policy agenda, not merely to repair parts of it.

If these characterizations are realistic, a daunting conclusion necessarily follows. As policy-making in most countries is generally routine or incremental and rarely fundamental, most policy regimes will show an inbuilt bias against adopting innovative research findings. Routinists prefer information that reinforces preformed opinions and expectations; incrementalists only want to know what will get them through another day or controversy. So we should not be shocked when policymakers profess—as they often do—that in the normal course of their duties they do not find ‘big question’ research all that helpful. Generally, these are not the questions they want answered—or even asked.

Corollaries follow from this conclusion. First, development researchers can usually expect resistance among policymakers to research advice that threatens to undermine long held assumptions. Second, researchers should nonetheless organize and communicate new knowledge so as to influence even routine and incremental decisions, because those are the decisions that policymakers normally prefer to make. And third, researchers should assign themselves the long-term work of building capacity, expanding horizon, and regime improvement. Slowly percolating good and helpful policy approaches through the policy community will test researchers’ patience, but it can pay off as minds open and attitudes change.

Context Counts

For the most part, researchers seeking to influence policy can expect to encounter a measure of institutional reluctance among policymakers. Except when they are attempting to manage a political transition or some crisis, especially an economic crisis, government leaderships usually do not spontaneously invite innovative advice from the research community; on the whole, they do not avidly search out fresh problems—or welcome unsettling solutions. To achieve influence, researchers, and their policymaking allies, need to devise strategies suited to the political context in which they work.

Strategy making starts with a closer study of governmental receptivity to proffered research. And here IDRC’s 23 case studies of research-for-policy have yielded helpful guidance. The study uncovered five different policy/political contexts—each summoning a specific strategic approach by researchers intending to move knowledge into policy. In summary, governments and policy communities tend to sort themselves into these five recognizable categories of research and policy interaction.

Clear government demand

In this welcoming context, policymakers want knowledge, and are prepared to act on it. Also, policymakers enjoy a capacity to receive and understand research-based policy advice when it is presented, and to apply it practically to the policy problems before them. The policy window is wide open to researchers. To make their most effective contribution, researchers need to build relationships of trust with decision makers, and establish a reputation for providing knowledge that is timely and dependable.

The likelihood of exercising influence in such a context is high. Habits and patterns of communication are in place, policy capacity is sufficient, and policymakers show a healthy appetite for research information and recommendations.

Government interest in research, but leadership absent

The window of influence is only partially open in this context. The salient policy issue is well known to government authorities, and is considered important. But the structures to implement recommendations from research are missing. Policymakers have not yet taken the lead in deciding what to do, and no clear decision making process is evident.

Circumstances like these call for leadership from researchers themselves—beginning with careful attention to communication between research and policy communities. Experience shows that researchers, by actively engaging policymakers, can propel the transmission of relevant research into the policy discourse. But these circumstances also demonstrate that governmental interest by itself does not guarantee that research will actually influence policy decisions or action. To have influence, research needs a plan of implementation, or a champion among policymakers willing to put the research to work.

Government interest in research, but with a capacity shortfall

Again, the window for research influence appears half-open. Leaders in the policy community acknowledge the significance of the issue; they might already have addressed it in preliminary stages. They may also have affirmed the potential value of research. But they have not invested the necessary resources in capacity for adoption or implementation—either because no such resources are available, or because other policy priorities have been judged more pressing, and are fully occupying all available capacity. Links between research and decision processes under these conditions are generally weak. Researchers therefore face a twofold challenge. They have to help build capacity for the conversion of research knowledge into policy and action. And they have to try to move the issue up the ranks of decision-making priorities. Case studies have identified effective strategies to meet both these challenges.

A new or emerging issue activates research, but leaves policymakers uninterested

For researchers, this scenario has proven both familiar and frustrating. Galvanized by an intriguing new question, or by the promising appearance of new answers, researchers achieve significant advances in solving some development problem. Yet policymakers remain either indifferent or averse to the research or its promise. The issue may simply have failed to register with the policy community as a matter worth pursuing. Or it might incite unwelcome controversy, or jeopardize some vested interest. And if potential beneficiaries of the research— people who would be well served by its implementation—never know of its existence, the research itself will probably lack political support.

This turns out to constitute a high-risk policy environment for researchers and their work, and it is a context that recurs throughout the research world. A considerable number of our 23 cases fell into this class of governmental receptivity, particularly in their early phases. In some of these cases, researchers managed to open the policy window, and engage the attention of decision makers; in other cases they failed, and the window slammed shut. Chances of success are improved when researchers and their supporters apply adroit strategies of advocacy, communication, and education—within and beyond the policy community itself.

Government treats research with disinterest, or hostility

Here the window of influence is tightly closed. Policymakers are preoccupied by other priorities, or may even be hostile to the issues, or to the contributions made available from research. (We found no explicit governmental hostility to research in our cases. But the line between deliberate, methodical indifference and overt hostility amounts to a distinction without a difference.) Where policymakers demonstrate no receptivity whatsoever to research, it could be said that the researchers themselves are ahead of their time. Nor should it be wholly surprising if innovative (or lucky) research occasionally surges to a conclusion well before policymakers are ready for its implications. In any event, anyone involved in development research should arm themselves with patience, determination, and a clear-eyed recognition that attracting the interest of policymakers can demand long and systematic persuasion. It is also worth noting that in policy, as in science, things change. Attitudes evolve; preferences shift; needs arise; priorities are realigned; governments acquire new leadership. Windows open.

To summarize, research and policy influence each other in a dynamic interaction. That creates opportunities and constraints for researchers, and for policymakers. The meaning of influence itself is variable and context specific. Besides affecting particular policies, research can expand policy capacities, broaden policy horizons, and alter the nature of policy making regimes. In fact, influence often emerges only after years have passed; the most lasting effects of research may have more to do with improving the quality of governance than evaluating with the outcomes of individual policy arguments or government decisions.

Research influence will be determined only partly by the strength of the research findings, or the power of the researcher’s logic. Much will be determined by the character of the decision regime in which the research is conducted and disseminated—whether the policymaking is pre-eminently routine or incremental (which is to say, cautiously conservative), or more radically fundamental in its approaches to conventional wisdom and novel ideas.

And there is finally the issue of receptivity—whether the policy community actively invites research advice, or is indifferent or oblivious, or effectively closed to all research-based interventions in policy discussions.

What experience does demonstrate, however, is that each of these classes of receptivity calls for definable strategies by which researchers and research advocates can maximize their prospects of influencing public policy and development action. Policy influence is undeniably a complicated phenomenon. But all is not chance and circumstance. Researchers can design, conduct, and report their work for best effect on policy and action. That is the subject of the following chapter—an account of what works, and what does not—based on an evaluation of almost two dozen cases in more than 20 developing countries.

Document(s) 5 of 22