To celebrate its final project milestone, the EULAKS project invited project partners, researchers and interested stakeholders to the policy workshop „Informing the Knowledge Society. Feeding SSH Research into Policy Design in Latin America and Europe„, which was held at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) on September 23 – 24.
In the foreground, the workshop served to give all project partners the opportunity to present main research findings and outcomes of their individual work packages and work tasks which they performed in the framework of the EULAKS project.
Embedded in three key note addresses, a joint discussion was then developed on the general understanding of the relationship between social science and humanities (SSH) knowledge and policy formulation.
The question why, when, how and which information – produced by the SSH research community – is used by decision makers in the formulation, design, implementation and monitoring of policies was debated, with reference to concrete EULAKS research findings.
The discussion was led along the exploration of the differences between the Latin American and European context as regards the processes behind and conditions for successful SSH research – policy connections.
Three keynote speeches contributed different aspects to the discussion:
Annette Boaz from King’s College London and joint managing editor of the journal “Evidence&Policy” introduced theory and practice of how organizations can know whether their research is feeding into policy. Using the example of ten European organisations she compared different methods and best practices of impact assessment of research for policy use.
Christina von Fürstenberg, Chief of the UNESCO Section for Policy and Cooperation in Social Sciences, provided a UNESCO perspective on how to adopt an innovative approach to make social science the facilitator of participatory public policy approaches. In this context she referred to the UNESCO Programme MOST (Management of Social Transformations) that focuses on building efficient bridges between research, policy and practice and promotes a culture of evidence-based policy-making on national, regional and international level.
Jane Russell introduced main findings from her bibliometric work in Mexico. She is an expert in bibliometric research and analysis the development of collaboration networks between Europe and LAC in the last decades.
A concluding panel discussion, with participation of representatives of the European Commission, summarised perspectives on how the SSH can improve the design, implementation and monitoring of STI public policy.
You may find details on the policy workshopat the EULAKS website: http://www.eulaks.eu/policyworkshop.html
