The Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Policy: Conceptualising the Policy-Making Conditions

This paper presents a conceptual framework to understand the impact of scientific knowledge on the policy making process. The framework unpicks the institutional conditions in the policy-making systems. Existing literature on science’s impact on policy has focused on the science system itself, the perspective of scientists or the science – policy interaction of policy deliberation and the relative role of evidence in decision-making, with little treatment of the user side. We note the continuing dissatisfaction about science-policy interactions, from policy-makers to public funders of science and scientists themselves (eg Smith 2013, Almeida and Bascolo 2006). The framework developed in this paper stipulates that the way policy ‘user’ organisations organise the search, uptake and use of scientific knowledge determines the impact of this knowledge, as much as the circumstances and the context in which the knowledge was produced and the amount of effort scientists made to ensure its impact. It is based upon a synthetic review of several streams of literature, namely the impact of research on policy (and society), scientific research in evidence-based policy and scientific advice and advice processes. We assume that while policy making is interest and power driven, the policy problems and normative and material interests are constantly redefined in the policy making process (Edler, 2003; Hall, 1993). Importantly, this definition process is influenced by the stock and flow of normative and cognitive ideas and their persuasive and legitimating power. Scientific knowledge is one important input in this (re-)construction of problem definition, interests and solutions, whereby scientists themselves do not occupy a neutral, objective position, but have their own – changeable - normative and material interests. We therefore adopt a reflexive institutionalist approach (Schmidt 2008, 2010) to operationalize a three dimensional SCI framework which allows us to understand the interplay between: • The meaning of the nature of scientific knowledge and ideas • The meaning of institutional conditions of organisations and individuals using knowledge (policy users) (drawn from Scott 2014) • The different forms of impact including conceptual and symbolic impact. The framework focuses on the ‘grey box’ of institutional conditions on the policy user side, the role of which is less understood. Examples from on-going longitudinal case studies will illustrate the framework in detail and unpack its constitutive components. We believe that the framework offers a novel way of thinking about processes of and conditions for scientific knowledge to exert impact. Above all, we reverse the focus both in the literature and in the governance of science away from a bias towards the activities of scientists and the incentive structure in scientific organisations to the user side. We do so by taking advantage of a reflexive institutional approach which takes the nature of scientific knowledge (content) and institutional conditions seriously and which further distinguishes between different types of impact. The paper is a key output from the Oslo Institute for Research on the Impact of Science (https://www.sv.uio.no/tik/english/research/projects/osiris/), funded by the Research Council of Norway.