Research and Communication: Bridging the Research-Policy Gap?

The subject of this article is the results of an online discussion, facilitated by the Pelican Initiative, on ways that evidence and learning can evolve within and among organisations and be facilitated on a societal level by multiple stakeholders. The introduction acknowledges the role of online networking and the challenge it poses of how to communicate emerging new ideas to policy makers, practitioners, and other researchers. The subsequent discussion is focused on how carefully planned communication can help bridge the research-policy gap.

Contributions to the discussion include some of the following information on organisations, links, ideas, and strategies:

1. Overseas Development Institute's (ODI's) RAPID programme and the 'Research into Use' (RIU) programme aim to better integrate the supply 'push' and demand 'pull' elements of national and regional 'innovation systems', and through an emphasis on "information markets" aim to pay attention to both the demand and supply sides.
2. Healthlink's website's "Monitoring & evaluation (M&E) communicating research group", which has reviewed different cases of M&E in research communication. The website emphasises that as research is being increasingly recognised and valued, more attention to, and funds for, effective communication strategies between policy makers, practitioners, researchers, and communities become available.
3. The ICD [Information and Communication for Development] Knowledge Sharing and Learning Programme, which focuses on processes that engage policy makers. "The initial stages of the programme, which included a scoping study, have shown that information and communication needs of policy makers go beyond the provision of evidence. There is a need to engage policy makers and enable them to use the evidence to inform policy."

At the two week mark in this online discussion, a discussant pointed to action-research and other participatory approaches to development, but suggested that some larger organisations may have predetermined agendas for which they find fitting evidence, instead of looking at research evidence. Another suggested that besides looking at the gap between research and policy, there is a consequent need to examine whether there is also a gap between policy and the practice of its implementation. A case study was offered on the case of participatory technology development (PTD) in the context of farmer field schools (FFS). It sought to show that "in many cases the 'direction' of participatory processes is predetermined by the project and its objectives, but shared interesting examples of innovations by farmers which were not directly related to the main objectives of the farmer field schools." The discussant concluded that PTD contributed to a situation where farmers were more willing to try things out - a field -level example of how a policy of FFS is yielding relevant outcomes on the ground.

A second case from a discussant was HelpAge International in Moldova and in Kyrgyzstan, where programmes were developed on the basis of highly participatory needs assessment processes. HelpAge organised training in participatory project management, financial management, fund raising, and evidence-based advocacy /media training (with accompanying seed monies). The work led to direct evidence-based advocacy at international conferences.

The article then lists a 12 -point summary of final contributions to the discussion, including the following:

• Interdisciplinary, multi-actor research teams in natural resource management that involve the 'end-users' of the topic under study;
• Bridging between research and policy as an active in-house knowledge-management effort;
• Innovative approaches to research - instead of being supported by a funding mechanism that would implicitly still consider communication as a uni-directional process between disconnected groups of stakeholders, support for a multi-actor approach to research where the emphasis is on process rather than outputs;
• Organisations and initiatives that work to further some of these issues: the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Healthlink WorldWide, ODI, The Research into Use Program, the International Conflict Research (INCORE), and International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED);
• Effective communication of research building on existing relationships of trust with policy makers, which provide the building block for more critical engagement;
• The relationship between research and policy - neither linear nor causal, in that it is influenced by many different factors/actors, including: competition between stakeholders that try to sell different interpretations of the same evidence to policy makers; lack of connections between the timetables and timings of policy makers and researchers; or incoherence between communicated evidence, intuition, previous commitments, and mass media communications.

While the discussion opened with concrete ideas on communication to bridge research and policy, it ended with a more refined set of inquiries. Concrete ideas included: simplifying complexity into plain language or visuals; translating location-specific evidence and determining to what extent its elements may be useful elsewhere; and finding ways to involve the intended audiences in the development of the communication materials in order to make them more appropriate. The discussion concluded with these two questions:

"1: What communication and information management approaches do we know of where the complex relationship between evidence and policy is explicitly harnessed? What do these approaches look like, how do they differ from more unidirectional communication approaches, at what levels do they work best, and what are some of the necessary skills for those involved?

2: If the need to make interaction and communication between researchers and policy makers more effective is accepted at a theoretical level, what examples do we have of a more balanced and healthy relationship between the two? How can we characterize such possible kinds of more mutually productive relationships to help people visualize how they could learn how to work differently?"