A brilliant recent piece on the LSE Impact blog about the importance and nature of trust in ensuring that research influences policy makers got me thinking about the implications for advocacy organizations. First a slightly truncated version of the piece, then my musings. This from the LSE Impact authors: ‘Trust is often invoked as a key ingredient to establishing effective

Here’s a wrap-up piece on what I’ve learned about ‘research for impact’ from a series of interviews on the real-world influence of researchers at the LSE Centre for Public Authority and International Development. This piece was first posted on the LSE Africa blog. Being asked to write impact case studies for the research programme at the Centre for Public Authority and International Development (full

Had an interesting exchange recently during a launch webinar for the new IDS report, Navigating Civic Space in a Time of Covid. The headline finding is: ‘The pandemic brought the suspension of many fundamental freedoms in the name of the public good, providing cover for a deepening of authoritarian tendencies but also spurring widespread civic activism on issues suddenly all

Next up in my series of interviews on the real-world influence of researchers at the LSE Centre for Public Authority and International Development, I explore the impact of Claire Elder’s work on Somalia, which raises a whole host of issues around how research can influence policy and practice: How the act of researching for a PhD can itself lay the groundwork

Next up in my series of interviews on the real-world influence of researchers at the LSE Centre for Public Authority and International Development, I explore the impact of Ryan O’Byrne and Charles Ogeno’s work on how South Sudanese refugees in Uganda understand and interact with refugee camp authorities, and how they engage with those authorities when they need help or encounter

In my third post on the impact of researchers at the LSE Centre for Public Authority and International Development, I talk to CPAID’s Melissa Parker about her ground-breaking work on Sierra Leone’s Ebola outbreak and how it helped her bring the ‘public authority’ lens into policy-making. When you send in the anthropologists, be ready for surprises – totally new players,

When was the last time you read anything from UNCTAD? Back in the day (say, early 2000s), its annual Trade and Development Report (TDR) was one of the big annual milestones (along with the World Development Report, Human Development Report etc). They were essential reading for any policy wonk. They’re all still being published, but they make much less of

Another day, another coffee conversation about how to ensure that academic research has impact beyond the ivory tower/dreaming spires. This time it was with Duncan McLaren, who has just started as a fellow Professor in Practice (is this A Thing now?) at the Lancaster Environment Centre and has been asked to look into how its research can get greater pick-up

Following on Tuesday’s post on using evidence to influence policy in Guatemala, here’s Enrique Mendizabal, founder of On Think Tanks and the Latin American Evidence Week (October 22-29th) It seems rather hard to come up with anything original to say in the field of evidence-informed policy – unless we consider the change from evidence-based to evidence-informed policy. The case study approach,

This guest post comes from Isabel Vogel (independent consultant, left) and Mel Punton (Itad) Billions of pounds of development assistance is being channelled into research and science, with the assumption that this will help tackle global problems. But in many countries, decision makers don’t turn to evidence as their first port of call when developing policies that affect people’s lives.

Guest post by Caroline Cassidy and Louise Ball  Over the years, at ODI’s Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme, we have worked with an array of researchers, communicators, practitioners and policy-makers, trying to make head and tail of how to get evidence to influence or inform policy. Reflecting on how far we’ve come, we realised that there’s a ton

All hail FP2P-reading nerds! Completing the round up of top posts from last year, the most read from 2017 is on research impact. Here’s the original for a lot of comments, many of them heaping scorn on me for being so out of touch – always a treat.  As someone who works for both Oxfam and the LSE, I often get