News
SPIRAL "UK National Ecosystem Assessment" paper publshed
A new paper has been published based on work carried for SPIRAL, authored by Kerry Waylen and Juliette Young. This paper focuses on the first phase of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment.
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Results of exploratory workshop on use of instruments to influence behaviour
Earlier in 2011, SPIRAL held a workshop on science-policy interfaces (SPI), their use of instruments to influence behaviour, and the criteria by which they could be evaluated. This first workshop was primarily exploratory in nature, seeking to draw out some complex research issues relating to the ways in which SPIs can influence behaviour in more or less successful ways, and to ways in which these roles may be assessed.
Stakeholder involvement, clearly vital to the success of SPIs, is not a straightforward issue. If some groups are disengaged, others may consider the SPI as biased. On the other hand, increasing the number of participants in SPIs may reduce the efficient operation of the SPI. Providing motivations for diverse groups of stakeholders to participate may be challenging. Successful resolution of these challenges is an important success factor for SPIs.
In this context, key individuals - translators, champions and strong leaders - may all have important roles to play. Attempts early in the development of SPIs to clarifying different roles and build common understanding about the issues can be important success factors. It was also noted in the workshop that luck often plays a role in effective SPIs, and building capacities and flexibility to take advantage of windows of opportunity can be important.
Independence of SPIs from particular political objectives was generally considered important. However, despite the ideal of neutral and disinterested scientist, in practice SPIs may have to present information in policy-relevant framings and perhaps engage in lobbying. Skilful balancing between independence, stakeholder involvement, and policy connections to achieve relevance (with policy connections), legitimacy (with stakeholder engagement) and credibility (with independence) provide another set of key challenges.
Regarding evaluation, it was noted that formal evaluation is quite rare, but can be very useful. Performance should not be assessed too early, as the outcomes from SPI take time to emerge, but process-oriented evaluation can be useful at all stages. Evaluation requires a clear framework of objectives, and indeed one of the benefits of evaluation can be the reflection entailed by the requirement to specify what the goals are.
Future work in SPIRAL will include further exploration of the evaluation criteria and development of metrics for their implementation. Research will consider the relevance of the criteria in different contexts, and in particular how the features of SPIs link to success or failure, and how different objectives may be traded off. This will involve empirical cases, via interviews, and a second workshop on the 15th December 2011 that will focus on verification of the developed criteria. For more information on this second workshop, please visit the “Events” section of this website.
