“Despite the much touted
evidence-based policy and practice movement of recent years, a new
National Research Council report reaches the striking conclusion that
“studies of knowledge utilization have not advanced understanding of the
use of evidence in the policy process much beyond the decades-old National
Research Council (1978) report.” That report, entitled “Knowledge and
Policy: The Uncertain Connection” failed to find systematic evidence that
social science evidence was being used. The findings from both reports are
bleak and apply to all the sciences says the NRC since knowledge from all
sciences is potentially relevant to policy choices.
2012 Report
According to the latest report, scientists have attempted to improve or
better understand the use of science in policy making in two ways—either
by strengthening the scientific evidence itself or by studying the process
in a scientific specialty called knowledge utilization. According to the
committee, “…the inevitable indeterminancy and context specific nature of
use prevents these two efforts from providing a fully satisfactory
understanding of the use of science or a satisfactory guide on how to
strengthen that use in policy making.”
Reasons for Failure
In the
process of describing some of the reasons for failure, the report noted
that one of the reasons has to do with the limited way in which scientists
may think about the process of policy making. According to the NRC, “some
mixture of politics, values, and science will be present in any but the
most trivial of policy choices. It follows that use of science as evidence
can never be a purely “scientific” matter; and it follows that
investigating use cannot exclusively focus on the methods and
organizational settings of knowledge production or on whether research
findings are clearly communicated and how.”
Relevance of Values
According to the NRC, the political and value considerations that enter
into the policy making process have been seen as outside the scope of
science. It added, “understanding whether, why, and how…scientific
knowledge is used…is uniquely suited to the methods and theories of the
social sciences. Making ‘use’ of scientific knowledge is what people and
organizations do. And what people and organizations do is the focus of
social science.”
New Approach
To make
better progress, the committee constructed a new framework for thinking
about the policy process and for conducting further research which builds
into the model recent developments in social science, the role of values,
and political considerations.
New Insights
In the
process of achieving its mandate the NRC Committee provides several
important insights about science, the policy process, and the intersection
of the two domains. Furthermore, the report takes a less pessimistic view
of the endeavor to understand and improve use than do other observers who
have concluded that“…externally valid evidence pertaining to The
efficacy of
specific knowledge exchange strategies is unlikely to be forthcoming.”
To the contrary, the NRC report describes an alternate way to frame the
issue and perhaps make more headway than has been made in the past.
Challenges To Learning
More
Among
the challenges in addressing whether, why, and how science is used in
policy are the different perspectives of the disciplines and investigators
who study the interface of science and policy making. This variability
leads to difficulties in defining the phenomena of policy making and use
and to different framings of the issue, according to the Committee.
Poor Models
Also,
there is no generally accepted explanatory model of policymaking, but
instead several different kinds of models, including descriptive,
rational, and political models. After considering all of these approaches,
the NRC committee concluded “…it is clear that the various models and
frameworks do not coalesce into anything remotely resembling a powerfully
predictive, coherent theory of policy making...” And the committee adds,
“This conclusion is consistent with the fact that policy choices are
context dependent.”
Two Communities
Metaphor
One
popular concept for addressing the intersection of science and policy has
been the “two communities” metaphor which posits that scientists and
policy makers constitute two separate groups of actors with separate
purposes, cultures and values. According to the report, “differences
between the two communities are associated with a contrasting list of
supply-side and demand-side problems.”
It notes that this framing
of the use problem “offers little guidance as to which of the long list of
factors, from either side, best explains variance in use, let alone how
the factors interact and whether they apply only in specific settings or
have general applicability.”
Interaction Model
Among
the strategies used by investigators seeking to bridge the gap between the
two communities are different communication strategies and different
researcher-user collaborations. These strategies are known as translation,
brokering, and interaction. In explaining each of these, the committee
notes that the interaction model goes beyond transfer, diffusion, and
dissemination and even beyond translation and brokering. The interaction
label covers a family of ideas directed to systemic changes in the means
and opportunities for relationships between researchers and policy
makers. Interaction models appear to have considerable promise and the
committee quotes one observer who believes they are the “most likely”
models to help us understand how research actually gets used.
Committee
Recommendations
In addition, the NRC
committee offered its own views about how progress could be
made in this area. These include a
reframing of the problem from how to increase the use of science to one of
how to help improve the process of policy making. The committee
speculates that perhaps an excessive focus on the first formulation has
distracted scientists from focusing on the second. Anchoring its view of
the problem from the perspective of the policy maker, the committee offers
its own framework as follows:
New Framework
“Our
proposed research framework is based on a view of policy makers engaged in
an interactive, social process that assembles, interprets, and argues over
science and whether it is relevant to the policy choice at hand, and if
so, using that science as evidence supporting their policy arguments.
Policy argument as a form of situated, practical reasoning directly leads
to a concern with how evidence, in the specific way now defined, is
used rather than how it is produced.”
The committee’s
recommendations are all about paying more attention to what happens during
actual policy arguments when science presumably has the opportunity to
make a difference. The recommendations fall into three categories.
Three Pronged Approach
As a
necessary first step, it calls for paying more attention to investigating
what constitutes valid arguments from the policymakers’ perspective and
from that of the persons they need to persuade. Second, the committee
calls for better understanding of the decision process itself,
particularly in light of what is being learned about the psychological
processes in decision-making.
Systems Perspective
Perhaps
the centerpiece of the NRC report’s contribution is the call for the use
of a systems perspective to investigate the use of science in
policymaking. It describes such an approach as one of “…an iterative
learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run,
static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term dynamic view,
reinventing our policies and institutions accordingly. Such an approach
has already been showcased at an an NIH symposium on childhood obesity.
http://tinyurl.com/c8h9zl8
New Metaphor
Because evidence does not reside only in the world where science is
produced but rather emerges in the world of policy making where the
committee says it is interpreted, made sense of, and used, then
evidence-influenced politics is potentially a more informative
metaphor than evidence-based policy. ■
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