I have only limited, and certainly not generalisable experience about the WHO approach to policymaking, but I did participate in the preparation of an evidence brief for policy <https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/346592> , on the production of which we also recently published an evaluation <https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12961-... . One thing that seems very important to me - in line with what Wilbber Sabiiti noted upon the example of COVID-19, or following Kingdon’s model <https://www.amazon.com/Alternatives-Policies-Epilogue-Classics-Political... of policy streams - is agenda setting.
The main problem is not that much that policy makers don’t understand research but that they are not interested in it, unless they perceive the problem which that piece of research may address as urgent and important for them to solve. This is why the media, blogs, etc. that Chris Zielinski and Joseph Ana very rightly emphasised are in my view very important. However, there are a lot of different, often competing voices in the media, and policy makers, especially politicians, are the very experts of forging their own narrative and agenda using those, so I don’t think we can expect that researchers will ever be able to outcompete them in this contest for society’s interest.
Therefore, I think that our ambition as researchers should rather be to spread our ideas within the expert circles of policy administration, and wait for the opportunity to arise. High-level policy interest may or may not come, but if a case is well built and mid-level policy makers are convinced about the effectiveness of a proposed solution, it has a chance to go through when "the stars are aligned”. At that point at the latest, it is also key to have policy brokers with a sound understanding of - and preferably informal ties to - the world of politics, who can explain to decision makers why the proposed solution is beneficial to all the stakeholders involved. Therefore, the more these mid-level policy makers are involved in the research communication process, the more chance one has to be effective, but one may often have to wait to see that.
Best regards,
Balázs
HIFA profile: Balazs Babarczy is a Senior researcher at the Syreon Research Institute, Budapest, Hungary. www.syreon.eu balazs.babarczy AT syreon.eu
https://www.hifa.org/support/members/balazs
