PEPtalk: The evolving landscape of evidence in policy and practice: navigating the labyrinth
In the past 30 or so years our understanding of research and evidence use has broadened – moving from linear views of an evidence use ‘pipeline’ to an appreciation of the dynamic ways in which various forms of evidence and knowledge are combined to bring about policy and practice change. This more nuanced understanding has led to a proliferation of terminologies to describe how groups of people produce, share and use knowledge together and a labyrinth of approaches and possibilities. In this presentation I will reflect on some of the issues that this landscape presents for those working at the interface of evidence and policy and suggest some ways of navigating these.
Vicky Ward is Reader in Management at the University of St Andrews, Director of the Research Unit for Research Utilisation (RURU; www.ruru.ac.uk) and Chair of the UK Knowledge Mobilisation Forum (www.knowledgemobilisation.net). She has spent the last 15 years researching aspects of knowledge mobilisation and knowledge sharing across the health and social care and other sectors, with a particular focus on how diverse groups of people (practitioners, academics, communities) create and share knowledge with each other. She has a particular interest in knowledge mobilisation frameworks, knowledge brokering, knowledge co-production and embedded research and has published a range of peer-reviewed papers focusing on her original research in these areas. From September 2021 to December 2023 she held a Parliamentary Academic Fellowship with the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology to study how parliaments across the world access and harness academic research.