Research to Policy: Seeking Out Opportunities and Overcoming Barriers

Linda Silka, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, University of Maine

A major reason all of us are involved in SPSSI is that we are not interested in simply doing research for research’s sake, with the only result being that it ends up in a journal but doesn’t impact the problem (we take to heart Kurt Lewin’s advice issued many years ago). We want to make a difference. And often that difference is in the policy realm. We want to do research that at the local, state, and national level will provide the evidence and means for creating impactful policies. Given our commitment to making a difference, how do we do this better?

At the SPSSI conference in San Diego, the Policy Committee under the leadership of Sarah Mancoll created a bulletin board asking people to post the issues they thought should be the focus of research by SPSSI. The list was rich and included many urgent issues for which research is needed to inform policy.

My SPSSI colleagues Chelsea Crittle, Emily Leskinen, and Katya Magacheva and I then led a discussion session that had the goal of bringing together people to share ideas about seeking out opportunities and overcoming barriers. The conversation was rich and exciting.

We discovered that we are all struggling with the challenge that our research is having less impact than it should and often less uptake then we are seeing from research done by other disciplines.  We discussed why that is the case. It turns out that some factors regularly stand in the way of having an impact. Timing is one: we talked about the ways in which our research too often gets to the policy makers too late, well beyond when they could use it. We take too long as we focus on getting all of the niceties in place. Another problem is that we often don’t understand what “levers” policy makers have at their disposal to make change and how to do research that could impact those levers. We often do research simply assuming policy makers can do certain things to create change yet often those strategies aren’t within their capacity.

An overarching take home is that we need to find better ways to get the word out about the implications of our research. Toward that end, the SPSSI Policy Committee put together a full day workshop aimed at teaching us how we can use readily available op eds opportunities to get the word out about our research in ways that will bring it before the public and policy makers. A leader from the Scholar Strategy Network taught us in a daylong session how we can master this strategy and make a difference. Together with the discussion session, these conference events created for many of us a better road map for how SPSSI can go forward in addressing the critical problems for which we have developed so much knowledge that could guide future directions for policy.

We would love to hear about what you are doing to increase the policy impact of your research!

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