By Tanja Kähkönen, University of Eastern Finland, School of Forest Sciences & Institute for Natural Resources, Environment and Society

This autumn I attended the first joint JRC-IIASA Summer School on Evidence and Policy, which brought together policymakers and early-career scientists like myself to learn about the evidence-policy interface. After intensive days of interacting at lectures, learning together, and sharing views during the breaks, I can really say that as scientists we are operating in a different culture to policymakers.

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Discussion and debate fostering greater understanding between researchers and policymakers at the JRC-IIASA summer school

This difference extends not only to what we do in our daily work, but also to what kind of language we use, how we communicate, and what level of certainty we give—or have to give—to the issues that we address. Often as scientists we are so intensively involved in our own work that we forget that communicating our research to policymakers cannot be done in the same way as communication with other researchers. This is because policymakers have different evidence needs, expected timeframes for information production, and level of discipline-specific understanding.

However, despite the different cultures, it is possible to learn to speak each others’ language and communicate more efficiently. Developing this communication was practiced throughout the course and a significant part of this took place during “masterclasses,” given by people who are themselves at the science-policy interface as part of their daily work.

I found the masterclass session on wicked problems and evidence-based policy, run by Jan Staman and Annick de Vries from the Rathenau Institute in the Netherlands, particularly attention-grabbing. They pointed out that apart from crises, for which policymakers need rapid evidence on specific topics, wicked—difficult to solve—problems such as creating climate change policy may face problems of scientific evidence overload, political dead-locks, and societal controversies.

The masterclass on uncertainty, risk and hazard, and the links to policymaking was also particularly eye-opening. Session leaders David Wilkinson and Jutta Thielen of the JRC suggested that a range of scenarios and consequences should be offered to policymakers in order to allow them to take better decisions under uncertain conditions in which risks of human loss or health hazard maybe high.

Other sessions focused on foresight, effective communication, using games for informing public and policy debates (crowdsourcing our search for solutions), big data, randomization, modeling, and the pros and cons of working at the science-policy interface—all very important topics for improving communication between scientists and policymakers.

All in all, I guess the take home messages of this course are different for each participant. As a scientist, the big messages for me came from the wrap up session in which “dos and don’ts” for evidence-informed policymaking were summarized by all the summer school participants. For the “dos” words such as trust, communication, providing clear and concise messages, being certain about something, keeping it simple, and understanding policy processes leapt out at me.

Despite the fact that the summer school lasted only three days, I am positive that it will have a lasting effect on the participants, opening a path for cross-cultural understanding between scientists and policymakers. Together improving communication to the benefit of our changing society.

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Participants of the first JRC-IIASA Summer School on Evidence and Policy

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.