Communicating What Works Bringing Knowledge into Development Policy

This article explores attitudes of social scientists engaged in international development research, mainly development economists, towards the role of communication in influencing development policy. It is based on an international survey of researchers (N = 79) as well as in-depth interviews (N = 6) with representatives of the same group. Results confirm the two-communities' thesis that researchers and policy-makers are situated in different institutional settings. The article also provides a more nuanced view, how this divide differs across topics or contexts. A common judgement was that research should strive to influence policy and the respondents stressed that they were actively working to make this come true. Still, they also found that the academic reward structure have a negative impact on a more sustained engagement with policy-makers. Researchers will rise in academic rankings based on what they publish in peer-reviewed journals, not because of efforts to improve development policy. Researchers tended to believe that engaging with policy-makers in face-to-face settings would give them the best opportunity to achieve impact, a finding which echoes previous studies. There was broad support for the idea that researchers and policy-makers should get involved in constructive engagement based on mutual respect. Somewhat surprisingly, using specialists such as communications experts for getting the message through was not regarded highly despite all the promotion going on for development research communication.