📜 The inverse relationship between academic interest and policy utility

If you talk to data nerds, they tell you all we need is good quality data. If you talk to a political scientist, they tell you that data is just one input. In many cases, it’s not even an input into policymaking because there are all these competing interests that the policymaker is trying to balance. If it’s an election year, as this year is in a lot of countries, political interests will trump other interests. 

Even if the question was relevant for policy at the time, by the time the research is done that issue may no longer be relevant. You just have shiny results that nobody cares about. Researchers need to be much more responsive to policymaking needs. There are a number of organisations that are trying to ensure that evidence is provided in a timely manner, and that’s all part of the reason that the Hewlett Foundation is moving towards supporting actors that deploy a broader methodological toolkit and are more proximate. If you’re in the area, if you’re in the country and there’s a policy issue that needs to be addressed within a week… you have heard about that first hand, you know the context, you have the relationships, you can mobilise yourself and respond to that in a timely fashion.

There’s often an inverse relationship between what’s academically interesting and can therefore get published, and what is relevant for policy. A lot of the more important policy questions won’t be interesting enough for journal editors to publish, because it’s the everyday, the simple things that we’ve already studied, and that maybe don’t require new forms of evidence. Maybe the problem just requires that you synthesise what already exists and present it in a format every policymaker can understand. 

The way that researchers write is for other research audiences. It’s not really for policymakers who only have a few seconds of attention for any given topic. Research papers are not fun to read if you are not a researcher. How can we make research more responsive to policy decision making? We partner with a number of organisations that are trying to do that. They exist not because they want to publish, but because they want to serve the public good.