Strategies for Impact and Policy Relevance

The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) is a United Kingdom (UK) think tank on international development. The organisation's focus is informing policy and practice which lead to the reduction of poverty, through applied research, policy advice, and policy-focused dissemination and debate. John Young presents 5 years of lessons learnt from ODI's Research and Policy in Development programme (RAPID), including an analytical framework identifying 4 broad factors to maximise the impact of research on policy and practice.

Young emphasises that policy processes are "fantastically complicated". As stated here, they are "complex, multifactorial and non linear....Simply presenting research results to policymakers and expecting them to put them into practice is very unlikely to work." He continues by emphasising that research-based evidence usually plays a very minor role. "A recent ODI study of factors influencing chronic poverty in Uganda found that only two of twenty-five were researchable issues..." As stated by Phil Davies of the UK Cabinet office, "researchers and policymakers have completely different concepts of what constitutes good evidence. Researchers only consider their results to be reliable if they are proven scientifically, underpinned by theory, are reluctant to say anything until it is, and then wrap it up in caveats and qualifications. Policy makers will take more or less anything that can help them to make a decision which seems reasonable and has a clear message and is available at the right time." Young states that research-based evidence can contribute to policies which can have a dramatic impact on people’s lives and that researchers need a holistic understanding of the context they are working in. "While there are an infinite number of factors which affect how research-based evidence does or doesn’t influence policy, it is possible to get enough understanding to be able to make decisions about how to maximise the impact of research on policy and practice relatively easily. ODI has developed a simple analytical framework identifying four broad groups of factors." These factors are:

1. External influences: those factors outside the working context which affect what happens within it, such as, donor policies, for example.
2. Political context, includes the people, institutions and processes involved in policy making.
3. The evidence itself, including the type, quality, and contestability of the research and how it is communicated.
4. Links includes: all of the other actors and mechanisms affecting how the evidence gets into the policy process.

Young states that "to influence policy, researchers need additional skills. They need to be political fixers, able to understand the politics and identify the key players. They need to be good storytellers to synthesise simple compelling stories from the results of the research. They need to be good networkers to work effectively with all the other stakeholders, and they need to be good engineers to build a programme that pulls all of this together. Or they need to work in multidisciplinary teams with others who have these skills." In addition, "there must be intent – researchers need to really want to do it. Turning a researcher into a policy entrepreneur, or a research institute into a policy-focused think tank is not easy. It involves a fundamental reorientation towards policy engagement rather than academic achievement; engaging much more with the policy community; developing a research agenda focusing on policy issues rather than academic interests; acquiring new skills or building multidisciplinary teams; establishing new internal systems and incentives; spending much more on communicating effectively with all stakeholders. This should include dialogue before, during and after the research itself, producing appropriate communication products for each audience, at the right time, and working more in partnerships and networks. It may also involve looking at a radically different funding model."


This article is based on a presentation at the European Association of Development Institutes Directors (EADI) meeting held in October 2007.