Abstract
“Impact” describes how research informs policy and societal change, and “impact agenda” describes strategies to increase engagement between research and policymaking. Both are notoriously difficult to conceptualize and measure. However, funders must find ways to define and identify the success of different research-policy initiatives. We seek to answer, but also widen, their implicit question: in what should we invest if we seek to maximize the impact of research? We map the activities of 346 organizations investing in research-policy engagement. We categorize their activities as belonging to three “generations” fostering linear, relational, and systems approaches to evidence use. Some seem successful, but the available evidence is not clear and organizations often do not provide explicit aims to compare with outcomes. As such, it is difficult to know where funders and researches should invest their energy. We relate these findings to studies of policy analysis, policy process research, and critical social science to identify seven key challenges for the “impact agenda”. They include: clarify the purpose of engagement, who it is for, if it is achievable in complex policymaking systems, and how far researchers should go to seek it. These challenges should help inform future studies of evidence use, as well as future strategies to improve the impact of research.
Highlights
UK research bodies face a major “impact agenda” dilemma
In this paper we evaluate that evidence base and relate the findings to key challenges to the impact agenda
We provide examples of where scholarship can support the design of engagement opportunities, the establishment of more realistic expectations for researcher practices, and more informed engagement with the politics of research impact
Summary
UK research bodies face a major “impact agenda” dilemma They must invest in the most successful types of research-policy engagement initiative despite facing uncertainty about the evidence for their success and ambiguity about what success might look like. The “impact agenda” has meant thinking about how to measure the impact of research through. While research evaluation has been the key way in which researchers and funders have thought about this dilemma, impacts have rarely been assessed using robust social research methods (Smith and Stewart 2017). It is no longer enough to tell good stories about individual projects and researchers In this context, funders must encourage research-policy engagement to help maximize the “impact” of research, and assess current evaluation evidence to identify the most promising approaches (Oliver, Kothari, and Mays 2019). In this paper we evaluate that evidence base and relate the findings to key challenges to the impact agenda
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