What kinds of activities occur at the science-policy interface?
Last year, Science Europe surveyed its members to find out what they are up to on the science-policy front in relation to the green and digital transformation. Their members are major public organisations that fund or perform excellent, ground-breaking research in Europe - Agence Nationale de la Recherche (French National Research Agency), Science Foundation Ireland, and Grantová agentura České republiky (Czech Science Foundation), for example.
Here’s a quick overview of what they found:
Activities funded
📝 Policy-orientated research studies were the most commonly funded activity. These types of studies are created to try to influence decision-makers (with good solid science, of course).
🏫 Next up for funding is training researchers to perform policy-orientated events.
👎 The activities that were less commonly funded were “in-house units proactively scanning
available research to inform policymakers” and “scientific expert panels to perform policy-oriented activities or to directly inform policymakers.”
Activities being done
💰🎬 On the funding and doing side, “policy-oriented events (workshops, seminars, conferences) and “Policy briefs/notes summarising scientific findings” came out top, whereas training researchers fell to the bottom.
🎬 On the purely doing side, we see those in-house units being more common, alongside briefs and summary notes. Bottom of the pile here was acting as knowledge brokers (broadly, acting as an intermediary that brings integrated knowledge to policymakers).
Most and least important activities
Science Europe also asked members to rank the importance of different activities that they funded or performed:
👍Policy-orientated research, events, and briefs ranked the three most important activities, with research being by far perceived as the most important.
👎Training was ranked as the least important.
Curious to know more?
Read the full report “Science–Policy in Action: Insights for the Green and Digital Transition” : https://zenodo.org/records/7777542