Bridging research and policy on education, training and their enabling environments

This paper revisits the research origins of one well‐known claim which has been used in policy documents over the past 25 years, namely that four years of education increase agricultural productivity. The oversimplification of the original research findings has influenced funding patterns of aid agencies, leading to a concentration on primary education in Africa. While this demonstrates a ‘successful’ case of research leading to policy change, it also highlights the way in which simple policy ‘narratives’ can result in inappropriate policy positions. We argue that policy positions on this link between education and the environment are also based on commonsense without sufficient research into what appears to be not a one‐way but a two‐way inter‐relationship between quality education and training and the wider environment.