The Wales Centre for Public Policy is a knowledge brokering organisation that mobilises evidence to inform policy and public service practice. While the benefits of evidence-informed policy making and practice are persuasive, the extent to which they have been achieved is contested. Both require effective approaches to knowledge mobilisation, particularly at the local level where context specificities undermine generic ‘what works’ claims. There has been limited research on how local processes of knowledge mobilisation happen, the practices they employ and why, and what can be learned from them.
We undertook a systematic scoping review of local models of knowledge mobilisation and interviews with knowledge mobilisers across the UK, to address these gaps in process and practice understanding and improve our own approach to working with both public services across Wales and Welsh Government.
The findings from our review identify three key features of knowledge mobilisation: it involves building and maintaining relationships with policymakers and public service providers; it involves the integration of different forms of knowledge; and it recognizes the need to tailor knowledge to local contexts, culture and capacity for evidence use by individuals, organizations, and systems. Interviews with knowledge mobilisers reveal the practices they employ to develop relationships, integrate knowledge and engage with context. We find that effective knowledge mobilization is characterised by complex, iterative, often informal interactions with diverse actors across research, policy and practice settings; the integration of different types of knowledge (including research findings, professional expertise and lived experience) to create ‘evidence mosaics’; and constant and consistent engagement with the specific local and policy contexts in which evidence is being applied.
Our findings advance understanding of how knowledge mobilisation, especially at the local level, can be designed to improve evidence utilisation in policy and public service.
PAPERS:
Durrant, H., Havers, R., Downe, J., and Martin, S. (2024). Improving evidence use: a systematic scoping review of local models of knowledge mobilisation. Evidence & Policy 20(3): 370-392 https://doi.org/10.1332/174426421X16905563871215
This review identifies key features of knowledge mobilisation at the local level but reveals gaps in knowledge about the specific practices and processes involved, as well as the demand for and impact of evidence on policy and public service decisions. To accompany the publication of the paper, we wrote an Evidence & Policy blog entitled ‘How to do knowledge mobilisation? What we know, and what we don’t’ (November, 2023). This blog summarises the review findings. It emphasises the value of establishing key features of knowledge mobilisation for improving how evidence is translated to inform policy, but also the importance of plugging the gaps on what we don’t know enough about; specifically how knowledge mobilisers operationalise these key features in practice.