Overcoming Common Anxieties in Knowledge Translation: Advice for Scholarly Issue Advocates

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Perspective
Topics:
Academic-Community Partnerships Climate Change
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Policy Points:

  • Faced with urgent threats to human health and well-being such as climate change, calls among the academic community are getting louder to contribute more effectively to the implementation of the evidence generated by our research into public policy.
  • As interest in knowledge translation (KT) surges, so have a number of anxieties about the field’s shortcomings. Our paper is motivated by a call in the literature to render useful advice for those beginning in KT on how to advance impact at a policy level.
  • By integrating knowledge from fields such as political science, moral psychology, and marketing, we suggest that thinking and acting like marketers, lobbyists, movements, and political scientists would help us advance on the quest to bridge the chasm between evidence and policy.

Faced with urgent threats to human health and well-being such as climate change, calls among the academic community are getting louder to contribute more effectively to the implementation of the evidence generated by our research, including in public policy.1-3 Although normative debates about whether scholars should engage in policy work persist, university strategic plans and academic funding agencies increasingly define “research excellence” not just as the creation of knowledge but also the “mobilization of knowledge for impact.”4, 5 In response, there is an emerging group of academics, labeled by Pielke as “issue advocates,” who see shaping public policy as their responsibility as scholars and citizens.6, 7 This constituency goes beyond the path of the “honest broker” who disseminates their research honestly and clearly, often around time rhythms shaped by the academy. Issue advocates combine these passive knowledge translation (KT) tactics with more active strategies that tailor evidence mobilization for the realities and vagaries of the world of politics.6 It is this constituency for whom we pen this paper. We seek to equip the budding issue advocate with high-level advice on where to begin when one seeks to mobilize evidence into policy.

References

  1. Bassett MT. Tired of science being ignored? Get political.Nature.2020;586(7829):337.
  2. Capstick S, Thierry A, Cox E, Berglund O, Westlake S, Steinberger JK. Civil disobedience by scientists helps press for urgent climate action. Nat Clim Change. 2022;12:773-774.
  3. Haynes AS, Derrick GE, Chapman S, et al. From “our world” to the “real world”:exploring the views and behaviour of policy-influential Australian public healthresearchers. Soc Sci Med. 2011;72(7):1047-1055.
  4. Oliver K, Cairney P. The dos and don’ts of influencing policy: a systematic review of advice to academics. Palgrave Commun. 2019;5(21).
  5. UBC strategic plan: shaping UBC’s next century. The University of British Columbia. 2023. Accessed May 15, 2023. https://strategicplan.ubc.ca
  6. Pielke RA.The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics.Cam-bridge University Press; 2007.
  7. Green JFG. Less talk, more walk: why climate change demands activism in the academy. Daedalus. 2020;149(4):151-162

Citation:
Kershaw P. Rossa-Roccor V. Overcoming Common Anxieties in Knowledge Translation: Advice for Scholarly Issue Advocates. Milbank Q. 2024;102(2):0227.