EADI Panel at the Bonn Symposium 2009:"From Research to Policy Action - Ways Towards Enhanced Sustainability"

This year's Bonn Symposium was organised by The Development and Peace Foundation (SEF) and GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Technische Zusammenarbeit) on 23-24 November 2009 in Bonn and examined the topic of "Sustainable Development in Times of Crises". As part of this event, EADI held a panel entitled "From Research to Policy Action - Ways Towards Enhanced Sustainability". Its main objective was to answer such key questions as how to organise research in order to strengthen the link between research and policy-making, and how to present scientific knowledge so as to make it more accessible to the policy community of state and non-state actors.

Chair:

  • Dr Andreas Rechkemmer, Professor at the University of Cologne and Beijing Normal University, United Nations (UNCCD)

Panel:

  • Dr Cornelia Nauen, Senior Scientific Officer, DG Research, European Commission
  • Dr Inge Kaul, Professor at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin
  • Nick Perkins, Head of Communications, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton 


Highlights and key points of the panel

"In the area of knowledge, the more you share, the more you get"

Dr. Cornelia Nauen believes that the research agenda of today needs to address the basic human needs such as food, health, environment etc. She also underlined the importance of contributing to the common pool of knowledge and combining traditional, local knowledge with science. In response to one question from the audience regarding the inclusion of people we usually ignore, such as farmers and electricians, in policy-making, she gave one example from the maritime field, namely the common database of fish species. The researchers decided to collect local names for fish species from all over the world and incorporated them into the database, which proved to be an enormous success and the database is now widely used by many.

"Unfortunately, the knowledge we have (...) is the wrong knowledge",

argued Dr Inge Kaul. Due to increasing globalisation, we have left the world of traditional national order and slipped into a totally new world of openness, which we do not yet fully understand. Dr Kaul gave the example of a survey of 176 books on public finance which was commissioned by the UNDP in order to see how economics reflects the age of globalisation. It turned out that only three of these books did not assume a single closed economy. Hence, Dr Kaul believes that today's research is often based on the wrong theories and models. That is why we need to recognise that reality has changed and get some of the fundamental concepts right before doing research and before translating it into policy.

"We value the knowledge that comes from beyond academia"

According to Nick Perkins, there is no single recipe for maximising the impact of development research. However, there are some factors that allow for better research organisation. He underlined the importance of being able to work in a transdisciplinary way and advised the researchers to concentrate on the problem or question that their research should address and to frame the solution to it. He also mentioned the ingredients which support the impact of development research: 'sticky messages', i.e. the message makes an impact, 'knit-working', i.e. building networks and identifying people who are able to support the drafting and implementation of the policy implication, and, last but not least, 'strategic opportunism', i.e. finding windows of opportunity for the maximum research impact.

 

Key questions:

The chair also put forward a few questions which were crucial to the debate: How should research be organised in order to strengthen the link between research and policy-making? What is the role of governmental and intergovernmental agencies? In response to these questions, Cornelia Nauen, who represented the European Commission, referred to the Seventh Framework Programme. It aims to address the most pressing issues and at the same time is based on competition in order to ensure the best quality of research. She also recommended thinking outside the box, engaging with people from outside the research community and thinking about interesting ways of passing on knowledge.

But how do we translate research into policy-making? Who plays the principal role, institutions and the state or the researchers? According to Inge Kaul, it is the individual who matters. She gave an example of how the UN switched from using GNP as social progress indicator to Human Development Index, which was developed by Pakistan's former Finance Minister, Mahbub ul Haq. This concept met with a lot of opposition at first, but has now been adopted as a standard. As a matter of fact, this very idea did not come from the UN, but from individuals, from intellectual integrity, said Dr Kaul.

 

Andreas Rechkemmer concluded that even though we had not been able to come up with one perfect solution to how to better translate research into policy practice, he hoped the panel had provided some interesting insights and made valuable points regarding the better organisation of research and had addressed the questions and problems that it should answer.

 

 

by Miriam Zeh and Natalia Werner

 

 

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