New ANZSOG Research looks at what’s stopping policymakers connecting with researchers

Ensuring that public servants have access to the evidence and program evaluations needed to provide high quality advice is a key feature of current public sector reform. Academic research should be a major part of this, but a range of barriers prevent this research from influencing public sector practice. 

A new report, Brokering knowledge, brokering relationships: Improving research-practice collaboration in support of public sector reform, produced by ANZSOG’ Dr Honae Cuffe, Professor Ariadne Vromen and Dr Patrick Brownlee and the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, explores how knowledge brokering works to cross institutional boundaries to connect research and practice and promote new approaches to evidence production and use. 

This article by the report’s authors summarises the challenges facing knowledge brokers and the difficulties of building relationships between researchers and the public sector, and looks at how we can build new models for good practice in researcher-practitioner relationships. This article originally appeared in the Canberra Times. 

By Honae Cuffe, Ariadne Vromen and Patrick Brownlee 

Governments want public sector reform. And the public sector wants a government receptive to the best evidence it can get its hands on. One of our most senior public servants, secretary of Treasury Steven Kennedy, gave a speech to the University of Adelaide’s South Australian Centre for Economic Studies last month on the importance of evidence. 

He argued: “The role of our academic community cannot be understated in helping solve some of our biggest policy challenges … collaboration among researchers and policymakers is essential to ensure evidence is relevant, timely, and applicable to policy deliberations.” 

The best way forward is to get research and policy working together. But if we want that, then we need what is called knowledge-brokering. As part of our research, we interviewed knowledge-brokers, the intermediaries who both collaborate with – and connect – researchers and policymakers. 

What gets in the way? Our research says that there is a deeper problem, driven by a lack of trusting relationships that underpin genuine influence and facilitate research impact. To facilitate translation, transfer and mobilisation of research into policy, these intermediaries must help bridge a trust gap. 

The three ongoing challenges for effective knowledge brokering

The first challenge is to become better at building relationships and trust in a context of churn. For these relationships to be constructive, they must be built on mutual respect and the capacity for influence. That’s hard to build when academic researchers are pulled in different directions and juggling education timetables and administrative loads; or because policymakers come and go. And, there aren’t enough of them to go around, not enough to build a resilient framework for Australians. 

This means all parties must be open to listening to each other. While our research found relationships can happen at the organisational or institutional level, they are mainly maintained and propelled by individual-level relationships between knowledge-brokers and policymakers, between knowledge-brokers and individual researchers. 

This presents two problems within the first challenge: the first is the bias or conflict-of-interest that can arise in commissioning research that only includes familiar knowledge-brokers and researchers, while actively excluding others. The second is the high churn within the public sector, creating the issue our colleague Alastair Stark describes as institutional amnesia. 

Policymakers frequently move to different agencies and to different responsibilities, taking with them their networks with knowledge brokers and researchers and the capabilities for collaboration. Often, trust must be rebuilt time and time again, becoming a source of frustration for researchers due to the opacity of public sector churn. For best practice policy development, workforce commitments and deployments must be clear at the outset and individuals empowered to make decisions. 

The second challenge? The public sector urgently needs to build the capability to set research agendas. We heard from those in both university and public sector settings who understand the need for – and take on – network building activities, knowledge translation and knowledge transfer in addition to their regular duties. They often have limited tangible incentives to do so. The capability to commission research, let alone define research problems, and collaborate on designing research questions and methodologies are not widespread in the public sector. 

Here’s an example shared by one of the public servants we interviewed: “It would be great if government would start to recruit for … a range of skillsets, so there’s more people within different departments who do have that ability to access and use and apply evidence.” 

Policymakers often become frustrated with a lack of academic appreciation of the political context for doing evidence-based policy and implementing it. At the same time, there is a need for more public servants with capability and qualifications in advanced research who can broker and enhance the communication and trust between researchers and policymakers. 

And the third challenge is about money – advice is often free while research costs. We heard from participants that research and the production of useful evidence is a long-term investment. “Governments identify an urgent need for information that really needed … five years of research behind it. 

“Then they reach out and ask someone to deliver something within four-to-six months … There’s no continuity of funding in between these requests … They expect the knowledge to be available without being willing to fund it in advance”. 

The existing commissioning and advisory process means policymakers seek advice from researchers and they often expect this advice to come for free. 

We also heard examples where researchers with the necessary expertise helped policymakers frame research questions and design, but when projects were subsequently put out to tender, they were won by for-profit consultants, rather than the original group of researchers who gave their time to co-design the evidence base needed. This is the kind of practice which brought us the PwC catastrophe and other big four concerns. 

Often we are told that university-based researchers just need to ask the right questions, and tell data-driven stories in succinct and accessible ways. Or that governments need better processes  for researchers to contribute  to policy problem definition and/or implementation.  

These edicts underplay the mutually constituted relationships between groups of people, and instead emphasise the transactional or commissioned nature of public sector-oriented research. But merely fixing existing practices does not resolve the absence of trust built on reciprocal respect, influence and impact. 

Building better researcher-practitioner relationships

Those are the problems. How can we address these challenges in knowledge-brokering practices to develop new models for good practice in researcher-practitioner relationships? 

The first and most important is recognition by the public service of the need to nurture meaningful collaboration – and set up the conditions to make that possible. That will require cultural change and a shift in the practices which exist. 

How could that occur? This requires a “getting to know you” phase, providing opportunities for cross-sector engagement, such as conferences or secondments or fellowships from academia into the public sector. 

And finally, the recognition that all work deserves pay – while it’s fine to get advice for free, that can only be partial and inconsistent. Robust contracts need to be part of the social contract. 

As Kennedy said last month: “Our democratic capitalist system relies not only on market mechanisms but also on trust. Trust that decisions are grounded in the best available evidence, that experts are engaged and heard, and that policies are designed to serve the public good.”