Introduction
One of the key questions we have at Transforming Evidence, is how evidence is made, mobilised and used by different actors, at different points in the system. Our view is that there is a set of participants (“actors”) who are involved in knowledge production and use, and we describe some of the connections between them. If we imagine that these actors are linked through a common purpose – to deliver useful research evidence for policy decision-making – we can begin to ask questions about how these connections might be necessary to achieve this goal, and what this might look like.
Our Approach
We have been working with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre to feed into their capacity-building efforts to support evidence use in policy. They have been looking at ways to assess and develop indicators for effective science-for-policy systems. More details are available in our report, Assessing national institutional capacity for evidence-informed policymaking: the role of a science-for-policy system (2022) and the related blog post Can and should science-for-policy systems be mapped and measured?
The March 2022 event which launched the co-creation process to develop an evaluation framework to assess the capacity for science for policy in the EU Member States is also detailed on the European Commission Knowledge for Policy website.
Ongoing work by Transforming Evidence is helping EU states to evaluate their own science systems through a mutual learning exercise for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre; an update on this will be published in Winter 2024.
We are also working with colleagues at the UK Government Office for Science to better understand how the science system within government functions, and how it can interface more effectively with external stakeholders. So far, we have mapped academic-policy engagement initiatives, and are now working to explore elements in more detail.