NZ iniatives lead the way
New Zealand is a leading country internationally in terms of its progress in linking social research to policy, says SPEaR Principal Analyst Raewyn Good.
New Zealand's approach to connecting social policy practice with research-based evidence was presented to an international forum in February, with Raewyn and Tania Rangiheuea, of the University of Auckland's School of Political Science, co-presenting two half-day workshops.
The occasion was the International Forum on the Social Science-Policy Nexus (IFSP), organised by UNESCO's Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST), and held in Argentina and Uruguay. It was a one-off conference that aimed to bring policy making and social science together, and develop dialogue among academics, policy makers and non-governmental organisations on social research and policy issues.
The forum covered five thematic streams with workshops presented in four cities: global issues and dynamics (Buenos Aires); social policies (Buenos Aires); population and migration (Cordoba); regional integration (Montevideo) and territorial decentralisation and urban policies (Rosario).
Raewyn and Tania's presentation, "Connections as Practice - Aotearoa/New Zealand initiatives to link social science and social policy", outlined how New Zealand had put the concept of evidence-informed policy into practice, starting with the Improving the Knowledge Base (IKB) project in 2001.
As a result of IKB, the government had agreed to four key initiatives - the SPEaR Committee, the improved Social Statistics Programme, a biannual Social Policy, Research and Evaluation Conference and the Building Research Capacity in the Social Sciences (BRCSS) initiative.
Raewyn says there was a lot of interest in the New Zealand approach, particularly the links between and among academic researchers, government social researchers and policy makers, the BRCSS and SPEaR networks, community organisations, and the wider social sciences sector. "We talked about the growing dialogue and how having some common membership across organisations encouraged dialogue and helped build a more connected system.
"It was evident that we are at the vanguard when it comes to linking social research and policy. We have five years of putting the rhetoric into practice whereas many other countries are still talking about doing it.
"It is helped by being a country with a small population with a lot of inter-connections between academics, government agencies and community organisations. The Treaty of Waitangi framework would seem to have encouraged communication between peoples in a way that many other countries had not experienced."
The presentation was illustrated with several case examples, including references to the Family Violence Clearing House, as an example of a partnership between government, universities and non-governmental organisations, which uses technology to make research information (including research), available.
They concluded their presentation by saying that research can only be used if it is known about, accessible, relevant, timely and able to be understood by a busy generalist. And even if research meets these criteria, it is still only one source of information for advisers, decision makers and practitioners.
"It was heartening to see that what we are doing is innovative and ground breaking, even though it is not always easy and we do not always all agree. However, compared to many of the countries attending the forum, we are relatively privileged. Unlike in some countries present, we are not physically shot for disagreeing," Raewyn says.
