Knowledge Use and Evidence Based Environmental Policy

There is a demand for knowledge to make informed decisions. This is particularly true when it comes to environmental policy. Scientific knowledge plays a central role in policy development, and scientists have often played an important role in both formulating what is an environmental problem and how they can be solved. In the last decade, the concept of evidence based policy (EBP) has been introduced as an approach to make environmental policy and practice more informed by scientific evidence. EBP can be summarized as the idea that decision making should be based on (or informed by) the best available scientific knowledge, or ‘evidence’. However, how do researchers and policy-makers perceive how scientific knowledge can be transferred from the research community to decision makers, and how it can be used when making policy decisions? This study examines ideas about knowledge us as well as how scientific knowledge has been used in Swedish environmental policy, focusing on knowledge produced using the systematic review method. This is a method closely tied to the concept of EBP and specially developed to synthesize scientific evidence to inform policy. The method has become common when evaluating interventions and programmes in social work, education, crime and justice, international development and environmental science. This study empirically examines assumptions about how knowledge derived from systematic reviews of environmental issues are to be used, thus contributing insight into the complexity of knowledge transfer. One organization that produces systematic reviews, Mistra Council for Evidence based environmental management (Mistra EviEM) and six projects carried out by Mistra EviEM have been studied in-depth. Three questions are asked: 1) How does systematic reviewers envision their reviews to be used as a basis for policy making in public policy? 2) What benefits and challenges do policy-makers see in using systematic reviews as basis for decision making? 3) And how have the reviews been used? In order to answer these questions interviews with both the researchers working at Mistra EviEM and recipients of these reviews – mainly Swedish environmental authorities – were carried out. The interviews addressed both broader questions about the interviewees' views on the role of scientific knowledge in Swedish environmental work, and how they perceive the opportunities for research syntheses to contribute with useful knowledge. In addition, the specific knowledge that the six projects has produced, as well as how the knowledge was transferred to and received by Swedish environmental authorities were investigated.