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WHAT WORKS NOW?
Evidence-informed policy
and practice
Edited by Annette Boaz, Huw Davies, Alec Fraser and
Sandra Nutley
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by
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151
8
Using evidence in environmental
and sustainability issues
Mark Reed and Laura Meagher
Introduction to evidence use in environmental and
sustainability issues
It could be argued that concerns about the environment have become
increasingly widespread, even mainstream. The word ‘environmentalist’
was coined as far back as 1902, and Rachel Carson helped to ignite an
environmental movement in 1962 with her book Silent Spring, which
drew attention to the adverse environmental eects of pesticides.
More recently, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change and Al Gore’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in
2007 have further highlighted the challenges, and increasing global
attention has been paid to climate change. When the internationally
agreed Millennium Development Goals were revised into a set of
17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2016, the choice of the word
‘sustainable’ was telling. Several goals are explicitly environmental
in orientation: climate action; life below water; and life on land. In
addition, other goals are closely interwoven with environmental issues,
such as clean water and sanitation; aordable and clean energy; good
health and well-being; and sustainable cities and communities, among
others. None of these is a simple challenge.
As individual nations and the international community grapple with
increasingly complex and interconnected environmental challenges in a
globalised and rapidly changing world, calls for evidence-based policy
have grown. However, environmental and sustainability issues present
particular challenges for evidence-informed policy and practice (EIPP)
for diverse reasons. These include: the political prominence and broad
sectoral reach of policies in this area (which often interact with a wide
range of other policy areas); tensions arising from policy making at
dierent levels (local, national, international); the wide range of spatial
152
What works now?
and temporal scales over which environmental processes operate; and
the complex, uncertain and often contested nature of the evidence base.
Powerful actors in this field may also seek to shape how problems
are conceptualised and addressed. For example, climate change
science, painstakingly constructed over decades, has to contend
with considerable levels of contestation and outright denial. More
insidiously, vested parties may seek to use evidence in partisan ways:
purporting to contribute data to scientific debate while nonetheless
muddying the waters over what is known and what is still in doubt (Box
8.1 provides a particularly interesting example of how the hydrocarbons
industry in the 1980s adopted many of the same obfuscating tactics
over anthropogenic climate change, as did the tobacco industry years
earlier over the health impacts of smoking).
Politics and vested interests aside, few other policy areas have to
consider such a range of spatial scales (for example, from battles over
the siting of a local supermarket to global climate change), alongside
temporal scales that range from rapid response within hours (for
example, to natural disasters) to the pursuit of sustainability goals and
targets over generational time-scales (for example, the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goals). Policy making in this area needs to
address issues that may have global causes beyond the jurisdiction of
any given policy maker, but may be felt locally in dierent ways by
Box 8.1: Selective use and non-use of evidence on climate
change
A publication in Environmental Research Letters (Supran and Oreskes, 2017) used
extensive documentary analysis to assess whether the ExxonMobil Corporation
had misled the public about the causes and consequences of climate change
over an extended period. The authors concluded that as documents from the
corporation became more publicly accessible they communicated a greater
degree of doubt as to whether climate change was real, human caused, serious
and solvable. For example, a large majority of internal documents (80% or more)
acknowledged that climate change is real and human caused, whereas only 12%
of ‘advertorials’ did so (such as op-ed pieces in large-circulation newspapers
like the New York Times), with over 80% of these pieces expressing doubt. The
authors conclude that ‘ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science –
by way of its scientists’ academic publications – but promoted doubt about it
in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the
public [about the evidence].’
153
dierent social groups. Policies need, therefore, to balance the need
to mitigate the causes of environmental degradation (often with very
limited budgets) with the need to enable communities to adapt to
unavoidable environmental change. They need to provide short-term
solutions to avert or cope with challenges such as flooding, while setting
in motion longer-term adaptive strategies that can reduce future impacts
and tackle underlying drivers of change. All in all, this is a tall order.
Compounding these challenges, evidence from research rarely forms
a single, clear-cut line of argument. The evidence base is often highly
fractured, for example providing evidence about just one locale or
habitat, or describing future environmental impacts based on natural
science alone, without considering social, cultural or economic factors.
Furthermore, the (developing) evidence base is often uncertain,
providing competing claims based on dierent methods and models.
These claims may be promoted in dierent ways by those with often
sharply divergent interests (see, for example, Box 8.1). Few citizens
or politicians have sucient technical understanding of environmental
science to be able to critically evaluate competing claims and counter-
claims, making it ‘relatively easy for a vocal, partisan minority to
sow confusion, hoping to justify delay and inaction by amplifying
uncertainties’ (Pidgeon and Fischho, 2011, p 35).
As a result, members of the policy community must interpret often-
contradictory research findings, alongside other lines of argument put
forward by actors with competing ideological framings (Pidgeon and
Fischho, 2011). Policies that promote sustainability inevitably involve
trade-os between protecting the natural environment and the social
and economic well-being of citizens. Policy makers must therefore
consider moral and ideological arguments alongside many and diverse
practicalities, such as budget constraints, political expediency and
unpredictable external events that change the parameters of decisions.
Bridgman and Davis (2000, p 31) describe this as a dynamic ‘policy
dance … [of] seemingly random movements rather than choreographed
order’. Others have described the relationship between research and
policy in rather more cynical terms: as a way for governments to
legitimise policies with reference to evidence from research only
when it supports their politically driven priorities (Sanderson, 2002).
Indeed, the complex and multifaceted nature of environmental issues,
and the rapidly changing and sometimes internally contradictory body
of research knowledge, may facilitate picking and choosing by policy
makers in their claiming the support of research evidence (see also
Chapter Two).
Using evidence on environmental and sustainability issues
154
What works now?
This chapter, then, considers how evidence is created, understood,
synthesised and used in environmental and sustainability policy
development and implementation. The nature and use of evidence
here contrasts somewhat with the other policy and practice areas
covered in this section of the book, many of which have mirrored the
health sector’s trajectory of growing emphasis upon and then nuanced
departure from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) as the sine qua
non of evidence. In particular, this policy area requires evidence that
cuts across multiple systems and sectors, at diverse and sometimes very
large scales that are rarely needed in other policy arenas. The nature
of evidence ranges from quantitative empirical and modelled data to
qualitative and ethnographic accounts, including the ‘know-how’ of
‘what (seems to) work’ in practice and the ‘know-why’ process-based
understanding and theory generated by research (including formal
evaluations).
In a sense, lines between these types of evidence are becoming blurred
(sometimes deliberately so): research-based knowledge is increasingly
integrating insights from publics and stakeholders, and synthesising
evidence across multiple studies to provide more generalisable lessons
for policy making (see also discussions in Chapters Ten and Eleven).
There is an increasing move towards more participatory and co-
productive forms of evidence production, often in collaboration
with boundary organisations and knowledge intermediaries, with
the explicit goal of generating beneficial policy outcomes. There are
also a number of disparate disciplines providing evidence for policy in
this area, and many of these disciplines have distinctive approaches to
the generation and use of evidence. In this chapter we bring together
insights and approaches from across the range of disciplines and diverse
new initiatives that inform environmental and sustainability policy.
The nature of evidence for environmental and
sustainability issues
The nature of evidence informing environmental and sustainability
policy is particularly broad and increasingly integrated. It cuts across
multiple research areas and disciplines, and includes many forms of
expert knowledge beyond the academy (ranging from farmers to
international non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) as well as lay
knowledge such as that from citizen science initiatives. Evidence may
be drawn from the natural sciences (for example, climate modelling),
economics (for example, deliberative monetary or non-monetary
valuation of ecosystem services), social sciences (for example,
155
environmental governance) or the arts and humanities (for example,
environmental ethics and aesthetics).
Natural tensions often arise between these research realms – in
approaches, methods, premises, foci for investigation, criteria for
analysis and even the very questions posed. Researchers from dierent
disciplines may reach quite dierent conclusions, and such tensions
can fracture the evidence base. Hence, policy input from one line of
research may not always align readily with input from a dierent line of
research, or indeed with knowledge from other sources, making it all
the more dicult for policy makers and practitioners to make decisions.
Knowledge arising from research is explicit (that is, it has been
articulated in written or spoken form) and tends to get systematised,
decontextualised and presented in forms that are (seen as or purported
to be) widely transferable. Thus, this type of knowledge is particularly
suited to policy-making processes that typically operate at national
scales or beyond (Norgaard, 1984; Ingram, 2008), advancing as it
does generalised and somewhat decontextualised arguments. Lundvall
and Johnson (1994) refer to this sort of knowledge as ‘know-why’
knowledge, because research typically attempts to understand the
underlying principles and theories that explain phenomena (sometimes
through experimental trials of specific interventions). They contrast this
with the (often practical, often local) ‘know-how’ knowledge held by
citizens and stakeholders, which may be more tacit, informal, context
dependent and rooted in experience and place.
The need to integrate these dierent knowledge bases has been
increasingly recognised by international bodies. For example, there
has been the explicit involvement of civil society organisations in
representing local knowledge in the development of the United
Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which
also enshrined their involvement in its implementation. However, the
inclusion of local knowledge in the science–policy interface of the
UNCCD, in common with equivalent bodies for the other two Rio
Conventions on biological diversity and climate change, is possible
only where these perspectives have been codified in peer-reviewed
literature. In this respect, then, little has changed since the World Bank
explained how it wanted to promote the use of local knowledge in its
‘indigenous knowledge for development framework’: only after it has
been tested and legitimised by formal ‘scientific proof’ (World Bank,
1998, p 6). This approach has been described by some as ‘post-colonial’;
or, as Briggs and Sharp (2004, p 667) put it, ‘it is still the scientific
view, in all its wisdom, that can decide which indigenous knowledge
is worthy of serious investigation and dissemination’. There are now
Using evidence on environmental and sustainability issues
156
What works now?
calls for a new kind of science in which stakeholders and publics move
from being passive recipients of knowledge or objects of study, to being
equal partners in the research process (Keeler et al, 2017).
The rationalist epistemological argument is perhaps a more benign
explanation for the privileged position given to scientific evidence in
many policy-making processes, compared to claims of post-colonialism
or the selective use of evidence to legitimise decisions. However,
there is a well-rehearsed counter-argument from constructivism that
suggests that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is socially
constructed and influenced by culture, history and context.
The emergence of environmentalism, as it gave rise to many of the
policies that now protect our environment, provides a particularly clear
demonstration of this perspective. These policies reflect the shift in
Western civilisation from utilitarian perceptions of nature as something
to be used for human benefit, towards an ethical position that protects
nature for its intrinsic value. Much contemporary environmental and
sustainability policy can be traced back to Aldo Leopold’s (1949) famous
‘land ethic’, in which he argued for the moral standing we give to
other humans to be extended to non-human species and landscapes:
‘all ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual
is a member of a community of interdependent parts. The land ethic
simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils,
waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land’ (Leopold, 1949,
p 203). Viewed in this way, it is clear that both conservation science
and policy are based on a normative set of ethics and assumptions
that predispose researchers to pose and answer some questions and
not others. In this light, dierent arguments pertaining to the human
(typically economic) trade-os arising from environmental policies may
have an equally valid evidence base, but in response to very dierent
questions. The nature of relevant evidence in this field remains, then,
very contested.
Production and synthesis of research-based knowledge for
environmental and sustainability issues
Despite emerging nuances as to what constitutes ‘knowledge’, some
defend the primacy of scientific knowledge on epistemological grounds
as the only way of finding rational argument and universal truth upon
which policy can be based. The response to the conflicting accounts
often provided by science is to simply seek more and better research,
and/or more and better synthesis. This section concentrates on the
strategies and structures encouraging the latter.
157
There is an expanding range of tools available to summarise
knowledge, from expert-led, comprehensive meta-analyses and
systematic reviews and more time-ecient rapid evidence reviews,
to approaches that incorporate the knowledge and perspectives of
stakeholders and publics. These engaged synthesis methods range from
participatory methods such as citizens’ juries to the incorporation of
lay knowledge in systems models through Bayesian approaches (that
is, where participants’ prior beliefs are adjusted by new data placed in
front of them).
Initiatives in this area have proliferated. The Collaboration for
Environmental Evidence coordinates six centres focused on synthesising
evidence on issues relating to environmental policy and practice, based
in Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, Sweden and the UK. Each
centre secures its own funds and has its own set of interests (such as
mining, fisheries or agriculture), but they all contribute to a collective
eort at synthesising knowledge for environmental management. In
addition, the journal Conservation Evidence now produces an annual
What Works in Conservation publication providing synoptic evidence
summaries. Data quality of primary studies is a huge problem for
synthesis initiatives, significantly limiting the number of studies that
are available for review, but synthesis initiatives are raising awareness in
the research community about ways of improving research design and
data collection to enable more eective summations to be conducted
in future.
The nature of the challenges being tackled by initiatives such as
these is typically broad, requiring multi-sectoral and interdisciplinary
approaches to the production of evidence. ‘Interdisciplinarity’ is an
approach to producing and synthesising research that has been heralded
in many arenas, but it is perhaps most strikingly vital to addressing
problems relating to the environment and sustainability. Even what
seems to be a singular field, such as environmental science, actually
incorporates a wide range of approaches, paradigms and questions.
Just one of the disciplines within its umbrella, ecology, has itself been
labelled a ‘portmanteau field’, because when it emerged as a discipline
it carried with it a variety of approaches (Phillipson et al, 2009).
Interdisciplinarity beyond the natural sciences is mandated when
issues of sustainability arise, with evidence from dierent fields being
needed for crucial elements of societal well-being, the economy,
individual behaviours and so on. Many perceive interdisciplinary
integration as vital to providing evidence in a form useful to policy
makers and practitioners dealing with complex problems (Lowe et al,
2013; O’Brien et al, 2013). Indeed, as well as contributing integrated
Using evidence on environmental and sustainability issues
158
What works now?
solutions to problems, eective development of interdisciplinarity shares
many of the behaviours of eective knowledge exchange. What works
for both processes includes actions such as: joint framing of problems;
arriving at some level of reciprocal understanding; building relationships
characterised by mutual trust; and development of respect for all roles
involved (Lyall et al, 2011). An early and still leading example of what
works in combining interdisciplinarity with knowledge exchange and
impact generation is the UK Research Council-funded Rural Economy
and Land Use programme (RELU, described subsequently in Box 8.4).
Within the UK, research councils, which have long been separated
by the cluster of disciplines that each one supports, are being combined
into a single entity. Along with economies of scale, there is doubtless
a hypothesis (as yet untested, and not yet fully articulated) that this
will facilitate interdisciplinary synthesis. Development of capacity
for interdisciplinarity among UK researchers takes various forms.
Frequently, large-scale research programmes, such as the RELU
initiative or the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation, aim for
outcomes from multiple disciplinary inputs and, in so doing, can enable
at least some researchers to behave in new ways.
Explicit interdisciplinary attention is also sometimes paid to
developing the next generation of researchers, such as the PhD
fellowship programme run jointly for several years between the Natural
Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Economic and
Social Research Council (ESRC). Currently, the two councils are
jointly supporting a centre for doctoral training in risk and mitigation,
using big data; ‘the aim of the consortium is to produce a cohort of
researchers who can use large or complex datasets to understand and
ease the risks posed by a range of societal and environmental changes’
(NERC, 2017). While challenges of inappropriate peer reviewing and
obstacles in career pathways still exist, the recognition of the need for
interdisciplinary research and research capacity has grown. Taking this
further, many countries use the word ‘transdisciplinarity’ to encompass
work that is both interdisciplinary and inclusive of stakeholders. While
retaining the two terms of ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘stakeholder impact’,
UK research funders also often seek this combination (Lyall et al, 2015).
Recent decades, then, have seen increasing attention given to the
challenges of integrating and synthesising knowledge, leading to
a proliferation of approaches with strong interlinking to eventual
knowledge use. It is to this latter issue specifically that we now turn.
159
Encouraging and enabling evidence use in the
environmental and sustainability arena
The Impact Case Study Database (created for the 2014 UK Research
Excellence Framework) provides many examples of research impact
in the environmental and sustainability area. But, despite these
documented examples of impact, it is perhaps unsurprising that
there remain very real challenges to the use of evidence. One thing
is clear: genuine involvement of stakeholders and their knowledge(s)
is critical, although the practice of this is challenging and sometimes
still contested. Several key approaches to encouraging and enabling
evidence use by policy makers and practitioners are discussed in this
section. Most of these are seeing increased attention and investment,
and they include: knowledge co-production; the development of
boundary organisations; the promotion of impact-driven research
initiatives; and the use of knowledge intermediaries and relationship
building.
Knowledge co-production
In response to the challenges of producing and synthesising research-
based knowledge (reviewed in the previous section), there is increasing
interest in models of deliberation and co-production for environmental
policy (for example, Pohl et al, 2010). The deliberative democracy
literature argues for increasing decentralisation of environmental policy to
enable greater civic engagement in the development and implementation
of policy (for example, Hysing, 2013). Assuming that values are made
explicit, there is some evidence that deliberation can alter contextual
values (for example, the financial value placed on ecosystem service
benefits) over short time-scales (for example, a single workshop), but
deeper-held, transcendental values (for example, the non-utilitarian
value of ecosystems due to their intrinsic value or the rights of future
human generations and non-humans) are likely to require engagement
over much longer periods of time (Everard et al, 2016).
More co-productive approaches shift the locus of control from the
government to the governed, where new ideas can be developed
jointly between members of the research, policy and wider stakeholder
communities to tackle highly contested issues (for example, Reed et al,
2017). Increasingly, this is conceived as a nested hierarchy of interacting
governance levels, with the institutions of governance in these levels
typically diering in the scale of their jurisdiction and level of formality
(often referred to as ‘multilevel’ or ‘polycentric’ governance; Newig
Using evidence on environmental and sustainability issues
160
What works now?
and Fritsch, 2009). Challies et al (2017) describe multilevel governance
as a ‘governance learning process’ through which policy makers draw
on evidence and experience to learn about how to design and execute
eective participatory decision making. To more eectively co-produce
evidence-based policy in these ways, two important research challenges
must be addressed; here we will first consider the specific challenge of
designing and deploying eective ‘boundary organisations’, followed by
a brief discussion of the power of large-scale, impact-oriented research
initiatives and the often diuse but influential roles played by diverse
‘knowledge intermediaries’.
Boundary organisations
It is often proposed that the co-production and practical application
of new ideas by researchers and policy actors is coordinated through
institutions (often described as boundary organisations) in safe places
where these ideas can be tested and refined (often described as ‘niches’).
It is argued that such ‘socio-technical innovations’ have the capacity
to disrupt stable societal structures and norms, so that society can
transition to a new way of doing things (for example, from fossil fuel
to renewable energy systems; Geels, 2005). However, there have been
limited attempts, to date, to create the sorts of boundary organisations
that could be capable of facilitating the co-production of policy
innovations at these societal scales.
Real challenges exist in the design of boundary organisations and
safe institutional spaces or niches in which evidence-based policy
innovations can be co-produced and tested at societal scales. For this
to happen, Hanger et al (2013) argue that boundary organisations
must facilitate and manage a wide range of complex processes (Box
8.2). These include the creation of suitable boundary objects (such as
scenarios, assessments and data models) that can become the focus of
dialogue, and the maintenance of multiple lines of accountability and
governance (Box 8.2). Limited systematic knowledge regarding the
creation of boundary organisations suggests that there may be scope
for learning from successful examples (for example, ClimateXChange
– described in Box 8.3).
While still in its early stages, ClimateXChange is an example of a new
type of boundary organisation that could be used as a model elsewhere
to draw on the best available evidence quickly while benefiting from
long-term, strategic research. Reflection upon the relevance of its list
of identified success factors could be useful to others establishing or
leading boundary organisations of various types.
Box 8.2: The role of boundary organisations
Hanger et al (2013) argue that boundary organisations must facilitate the
following core processes:
1 double participation, that is, people from both or multiple domains need
to be involved;
2 dual accountability, that is, work needs to conform to both scientific and
policy standards;
3 use of boundary objects, where discussions can come together, for example
scenarios, assessment reports and data modelling;
4 boundary management/co-production, that is, communication, translation
and mediation between science and policy; and
5 meta-governance, that is, orchestration of knowledge across jurisdictional
levels.
Box 8.3: The operation of ClimateXChange (CXC) as a
boundary organisation
The Scottish Government has pioneered a new model for evidence-based policy
that enables policy makers to get high-quality evidence quickly from some of the
best researchers in the country, while continuing to support long-term strategic
research to tackle complex, global challenges (Wreford et al, 2018).
One of the Scottish Government’s new Centres of Expertise, ClimateXChange
(CXC), connects a network of government and university researchers across
Scotland to get the best possible evidence into policy fast. Some of this is
existing evidence, critically reviewed and translated to answer specific questions.
Some of the evidence is new primary research, rapidly designed and deployed
and then communicated to contribute towards policy development. All of this
takes place in the context of a longer-term strategic programme of research
(conducted at multiple institutions) to provide long-term datasets and tackle
more complex issues.
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Using evidence on environmental and sustainability issues
CXC represents a new type of boundary organisation that can balance short-term
evidence needs with the need for longer-term strategic research, integrating
knowledge from a large and diverse pool of world-leading expertise. Evidence
from interviews with CXC researchers and members of the policy community
identified a number of features that were critical to the success of CXC as a
boundary organisation.
• There are no magic bullets: the success of an organisation such as this takes
time and reinvention, using many different methods. It is highly dependent
on the context in which it needs to operate, on the people involved and on
changing policy contexts and evidence needs.
• Two-way, trusting and long-term relationships are critical to overcoming
barriers between policy makers and scientists.
• The timing of engagement with researchers is critical to ensuring that evidence
and expertise are targeted effectively at relevant points in the policy process,
where they can provide greatest influence and benefits. Flexibility at project
and organisational level, including the ability to draw together different
knowledge and skill bases, helps to enable research to remain relevant to
evolving policy needs.
• Researchers need incentives to participate: although opportunities for peer-
reviewed papers and research funding remain potent, policy impacts are
increasingly being rewarded (for example, through the UK’s Research Excellence
Framework and via promotion criteria).
• Instead of generating knowledge primarily via research push or policy pull, true
co-production of knowledge is needed to provide cutting-edge research that
has genuine policy relevance. CXC’s role in push/pull activities is balanced by
sitting within a strategic research framework that is able to advocate more
‘blue-skies’ innovation to the policy community.
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What works now?
163
Impact-driven research initiatives
As a more general challenge, including but not limited to boundary
organisations, it is necessary to overcome structural barriers to the
flows of knowledge so that research initiatives can focus more clearly
on impacts. These barriers exist concurrently with increasing trends
towards encouraging or demanding impacts among research funders
who themselves are finding it necessary to work together in new ways
when tackling complex challenges such as sustainability. Increasingly,
agencies funding research have encouraged and/or required researchers
to propose ‘pathways’ to impact when bidding for support, and this
emphasis is particularly conspicuous in large-scale, often multifunder,
interdisciplinary initiatives tackling complex problems.
Relatively early in this trend, a bold initiative relating to the
environment was funded with over £26.5 million between 2004
and 2013 by an assembly of research funders. The RELU initiative
had interdisciplinarity and (two-way) knowledge exchange as its key
interwoven themes. An external evaluation (Meagher, 2012) identified
a range of successful impacts stemming both from the programme
and from individual projects – but these did not arise spontaneously.
Lessons were learned through the RELU that have proved useful not
only to research leaders but also to research funders, among whom an
increase in confidence in this sort of initiative was identified (Box 8.4).
Knowledge intermediaries and relationship building
Boundary organisations and targeted large-scale initiatives are certainly
not the only mechanisms for overcoming structural barriers to the flows
of knowledge between members of the policy community, researchers
and stakeholders. It is perhaps especially important to note the facilitative
role played at a variety of levels in a variety of ways by ‘knowledge
intermediaries’ or ‘knowledge brokers’. Notably heterogeneous, and
quite often ‘under-sung’, these are individuals or entities comfortable
with the languages and concerns of both researchers and stakeholders,
and they frequently act as proactive facilitators of knowledge flows,
sometimes with a degree of translation (Reed, 2016).
In the environmental arena as well as elsewhere, people-based
processes such as trust building and relationship building have been
shown to be key to generating impacts (for example, Jagosh et al, 2015;
Reed et al, 2018). This has implications for how research units are
run, how intermediaries are supported and the degree to which such
‘soft’ processes are enabled or rewarded (Greenhalgh and Fahy, 2015;
Using evidence on environmental and sustainability issues
Box 8.4: The Rural Environment and Land Use (RELU)
initiative: interdisciplinarity and impact
The RELU aimed to foster knowledge exchange and have impact by:
• the requirement that all funded projects should engage in knowledge exchange;
• the organisation of combined researcher and stakeholder events, and the
creation of stakeholder advisory forums;
• the creation of cross-boundary work-shadowing and visiting fellowships;
• the expectation of publication of accessible policy and practice briefing notes.
It was clear that the RELU’s central goal of interdisciplinarity contributed to
its companion goal of knowledge exchange. For example, those involved in the
programme (stakeholders and researchers) overwhelmingly agreed that the
RELU’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity enhanced the capacity of its researchers
to deliver integrated understanding relevant to stakeholder problems. When
researchers and stakeholders were asked for key lessons learned, they emphasised
the importance of:
• leadership;
• requiring early engagement of stakeholders;
• a central pot of discretionary money.
In addition to a suite of impacts arising from constituent projects, the external
evaluation identified several overarching legacies of the RELU programme:
• enhanced conceptual and practical understanding of land use;
• influence in the research and science policy arenas, particularly in the growth
of acceptance of interdisciplinarity in policy-relevant research and in a shift
from a model of one-way knowledge transfer to two-way knowledge exchange;
• evidence of a set of approaches that can deliver research impacts.
Source: Abstracted from Meagher, 2012.
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What works now?
Meagher and Martin, 2017). Recognising, supporting, incentivising
and enabling individuals, units and institutions to play knowledge-
intermediary roles can engender the two-way dialogue between
researchers and stakeholders that is most likely to lead towards EIPP
(Meagher and Lyall, 2013).
165
Reflections and conclusions
Environmental issues are complex and multifaceted; approaches to
addressing them are no less multilayered. It is increasingly recognised
that diverse knowledge claims need to be evaluated as part of
environmental policy-making processes (for example, Sanderson, 2006;
Crilly et al, 2010). Rather than viewing these competing knowledge
claims as a problem, it could be helpful to view dierent knowledge
bases as potentially complementary, and where possible to integrate
the ‘know-how’ of ‘what works’ in the experience of citizens and
stakeholders with the ‘know-why’ process-based understanding and
theory of researchers. There have been some moves in this direction
in national and international environmental policy making, but the
tension between what is seen as objective knowledge from research
and the usually less formalised knowledge from other communities,
such as local inhabitants, remains.
Instead of automatically privileging research evidence above other
forms of knowledge, a mixed approach weighs knowledge from
dierent sources, recognising the potential for evidence from research to
be contradicted or disproved, and the potential for less formal types of
knowledge to provide valuable insights upon which more eective and
responsive policies can be built. The critical evaluation and synthesis
of some knowledges may be more challenging than others, especially
those that are tacit (the knowledge we hold but of which we are not
consciously aware) or implicit (knowledge that can be, but has not
yet been, articulated). There is evidence that implicit knowledge can
be useful for managing complex systems if it can be articulated – for
example, providing detailed information about how systems work on
the basis of many years’ experience living and working with a given
system or wider context (Olsson et al, 2004; Fazey et al, 2006).
Given the multiplicity of perspectives surrounding what are often
emotive issues relating to the environment and sustainability, it is
not surprising that explorations of participatory research have taken
place, for example, regarding the development and implementation
of natural resource management plans (Blackstock et al, 2015) or
participatory scenario planning in local communities (Brown et al,
2016). Learning from analysis of this sort of research may become
increasingly relevant as complex decisions are made regarding what will
inevitably be trade-os relating to both society and the environment.
Indeed, learning continues to emerge from formal impact evaluations of
research programmes as well as from critical reflection during complex
initiatives (for example, Roux et al, 2010; Spaapen and van Drooge,
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What works now?
2011; Meagher and Lyall, 2013). Capturing such learning should
progress our understanding of what works in supporting evidence use.
In sum, then, policy and practice relating to the environment and
sustainability face many challenges in using research-based evidence.
These challenges include: the inherent complexity of the issues involved;
dependence upon integration across multiple fields of evidence, even
within the environmental sciences; political considerations, including
but not limited to the potential for short-term decisions, avoidance of
controversy and/or selective use of agreeable evidence; and the need
for multi-way exchange across diverse audiences. However, at the same
time, research into the processes through which knowledge is produced
and used has spawned a number of practical strategies that have the
potential to enhance engagement between the research and policy
communities around these complex issues. These include the increased
incentives for interdisciplinary integration and the increased emphasis
(by governments, research funding agencies, institutions) upon the
generation of research-informed impacts beyond academia. Learning
from an increasing portfolio of ‘experiments’ about how to conduct
knowledge exchange is also key, alongside a growing appreciation
of the need to incorporate dierent sorts of knowledge along with
more formal research-based knowledge (such as the tacit knowledge
of practitioners and the experiential knowledge of communities).
Taken together, then, and without minimising the weight of scientific,
practical and political challenges to addressing issues in the environment
and sustainability, these trends show how ambitious initiatives can bring
research-based evidence more eectively to the fore.
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