Abstract
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) employs over 2000 scientists and seeks to maximise the value and impact of research in the EU policy process. To that end, its Knowledge management for policy (KMP) initiative synthesised the insights of a large amount of interdisciplinary work on the ‘evidence-policy interface’ to promote a new skills and training agenda. It developed this training initially for Commission staff, but many of its insights are relevant to organisations which try to combine research, policymaking, management, and communication skills to improve the value and use of research in policy. We recommend that such organisations should develop teams of researchers, policymakers, and ‘knowledge brokers’ to produce eight key practices: (1) research synthesis, to generate ‘state of the art’ knowledge on a policy problem; (2) management of expert communities, to maximise collaboration; (3) understanding policymaking, to know when and how to present evidence; (4) interpersonal skills, to focus on relationships and interaction; (5) engagement, to include citizens and stakeholders; (6) effective communication of knowledge; (7) monitoring and evaluation, to identify the impact of evidence on policy; and (8) policy advice, to know how to present knowledge effectively and ethically. No one possesses all skills relevant to all these practices. Rather, we recommend that organisations at the evidence-policy interface produce teams of people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and complementary skills.
Highlights
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) employs over 2000 scientists and seeks to maximise the value and impact of research in the EU policy process
The Knowledge management for policy (KMP) initiative was created by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), which seeks to maximise the value and new scientific protocol for evidence review, we describe the ways in which organisations, such as the JRC, try to combine academic rigour with a pragmatic research design
We problem experienced by academic researchers (Oliver et al 2014) discuss the potentially wider applicability and current limitations and explored in a related series in this journal1: there is often a of the JRC’s KMP agenda
Summary
There is an over-supply of information to policymakers, compared to the limited ‘bandwidth’ of policymakers, producing the need to synthesise and prioritise the most robust and relevant knowledge 2. Sought feedback on the skills framework at three 2017 conferences–two contained primarily European academics, and one global policymakers–convened to discuss the science-policy interface These methods helped the JRC reach a saturation point at which no expert or study identified new practices or skills. The combination of approaches is crucial to practical ‘sense making’, in which we synthesise large bodies of knowledge to make it relevant to researchers and policymakers It helps us decide which skills are suited to workshop training (e.g., research synthesis), routine organisational management (e.g., interpersonal skills), and longer term planning (e.g., evaluation). Literature search and review: Identifying articles through multiple search methods: manual searching of key journals and online media; electronic searching of databases including the use of free-text, index terms and named author; reference scanning; citation tracking; and snowballing (restricted to English language) This search included peer reviewed journal articles and the ‘grey literature’ more likely to be produced or read by practitioners and policymakers (Davidson, 2017)
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