No abstract

The recent moves towards incentivising ‘impact’ within the research funding system pose a growing challenge to academic research practices, charged with producing both scientific, and social impact. This article explores this tension by drawing on interviews with sixty-one UK academics and policymakers involved in publicly-funded knowledge exchange initiatives. The experiences of the interviewed academics point to a functional separation of academic practices into three distinct types: producing traditional research, translating research, and producing policy-oriented research. These three types of practices differ in terms of both the epistemic qualities of the produced knowledge and its legitimacy as valid academic work. Overall, the article argues that the relationship between relevance and excellence of research within the impact agenda is characterised by simultaneous contradiction and co-dependence, leading to hybridisation of academic knowledge production and expansion of the boundaries of policy expertise into the traditionally-academic spaces.

No abstract

Background: ‘Co-production’ is one of the key concepts in evidence-informed policy and practice – in terms of both its theoretical importance and its practical applications - being consistently discussed as the most effective strategy for mobilising evidence in policy and practice contexts. The concept of co-production was developed (almost) independently across multiple disciplines and has been employed in various policy and practice fields including environment, sustainability, and health.Aims and objectives: This paper surveys the literature to identify different meanings of co-production across different disciplinary bodies of knowledge. Such exploration is aimed at identifying the key points of convergence and divergence across different disciplinary and theoretical traditions.Methods: We performed a systematic search of Web of Science via a query designed to capture literature likely focusing on co-production, and then manually examined each document for relevance. Citation network analysis was then used to ‘map’ this literature by grouping papers into clusters based on the density of citation links between papers. The top-cited papers within each cluster were thematically analysed.Findings: This research identified five meanings of co-production, understood as a science-politics relationship, as knowledge democracy, as transdisciplinarity, as boundary management, and as an evidence-use intervention.Discussion and conclusions: Even though different clusters of scholarship exploring co-production are closely connected, this concept is mobilised to capture phenomena at different levels of abstraction – from post-structuralist theories of knowledge and power to specific strategies to be employed by researchers and policymakers.<br />Key messages<ul><li>The paper identifies five meanings of co-production: understood as a science-politics relationship, as knowledge democracy, as transdisciplinarity, as boundary management, and as an evidence-use intervention.</li><br /><li>Co-production is a multi-level phenomenon occurring at the level of socio-political systems, the level of institutions, and the level of situated practices.</li><br /><li>The paper identifies a need for definitional transparency and cross-disciplinary learning about co-production.</li></ul>

Despite the multiplicity of actors, crises, and fields of action, global public policy has known one constant, that is, the ubiquity of indicators in the production of governing knowledge. This article theoretically engages with the phenomenon of hyper-quantification of global governance in the context of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), debated and introduced in 2015. Increasingly metrics—such as indicators and quantified data to monitor targets and goals—are no longer just tools of governance but rather are emblematic of the new types of political cultures, enabling an interplay of material, techno-political, and organizational structures within which (statistical) knowledge is produced, disseminated, and translated into global public policy. The paper unpacks this complexity by proposing a new theoretical approach to quantification as an “epistemic infrastructure,” which emerges across three levels: materialities (such as data and indicators), interlinkages (such as networks and communities), and paradigms (such as new ways of doing policy work). Using the lens of the “epistemic infrastructure” on the SDGs, this article and the others in this special issue analyze the ways that quantified knowledge practices—in widely varying policy arenas, scales, and geographic regions—are at the heart of the production of its global public policy.

The visualization of ranking information in global public policy is moving away from traditional "league table" formats and toward dashboards and interactive data displays. This paper explores the rhetoric underpinning the visualization of ranking information in such interactive formats, the purpose of which is to encourage country participation in reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper unpacks the strategies that the visualization experts adopt in the measurement of global poverty and wellbeing, focusing on a variety of interactive ranking visualizations produced by the OECD, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the 'Our World in Data' group at the University of Oxford. Building on visual and discourse analysis, the study details how the politically and ethically sensitive nature of global public policy, coupled with the pressures for "decolonizing" development, influence how rankings are visualized. The study makes two contributions to the literature on rankings. First, it details the move away from league table formats toward multivocal interactive layouts that seek to mitigate the competitive and potentially dysfunctional pressures of the display of "winners and losers." Second, it theorizes ranking visualizations in global public policy as "alignment devices" that entice country buy-in and seek to align actors around common global agendas.

Background: The canonical view of expert legitimacy in policymaking links it to objectivity and autonomy from politics. Yet, in practice such ‘epistemic gains’ stemming from the separation of facts and values are problematic, as expert advice inherently combines political and technical considerations.Aims and objectives: This article addresses the puzzle of double – technocratic and political – legitimacy of experts by proposing a framework for understanding expert legitimacy as an interplay of three analytical levels: epistemic, individual actor and institutional. The paper explores this problem in the case study of global poverty measurement as a field located at the interface of science and policy.Methods: This is a comparative case study of poverty measurement in the World Bank and UNICEF. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 40 experts employed by the two organisations.Findings: The analysis posits expert legitimacy as constructed via navigation between specific practices of knowledge production, such as the production of policy-relevant and methodologically robust knowledge, a strategic distance between the research and the political setting aimed at extending or shortening the distance between experts and policymakers, and institutionalised cultures of evidence of the organisations through which expert advice is given.Discussion and conclusion: The paper offers a theorisation of expert legitimacy as symbiotic negotiation between technocratic and political modes of accountability which are irrevocably linked while remaining strategically separated.<br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>The legitimacy of experts is underpinned by a dual logic of political and technocratic accountability.</li><br /><li>The paper proposes expert legitimacy as an interplay of three levels: epistemic, individual actor and institutional.</li><br /><li>The tension between technocracy and politics is enacted on all three levels through practices of evidence production and exchange as well as institutional evidence culture.</li></ul>

Emerging from out of the shadows? Service user and carer involvement in systematic reviews. Children and young people Research Culyer, A.J. and Lomas, J. 2006 Deliberative processes and evidenceinformed decision making in health care: do they work and how might we know? Health care Debate Daykin, N. et al. 2007 Evaluating the impact of patient and public involvement initiatives on UK health services: a systematic review. Health care Research Beresford, P. 2007 The role of service user research in generating knowledge-based health and social care: from conflict to contribution. Health and social care Research Preston-Shoot, M. 2007 Whose lives and whose learning? Whose narratives and whose writing? Taking the next research and literature steps with experts by experience. Social work Research Moriarty, J. et al.