Strengthening capacity to apply health research evidence in policy making: experience from four countries

Abstract

Increasing the use of evidence in policy making means strengthening capacity on both the supply and demand sides of evidence production. However, little experience of strengthening the capacity of policy makers in low- and middle- income countries has been published to date. We describe the experiences of five projects (in Bangladesh, Gambia, India and Nigeria), where collaborative teams of researchers and policy makers/policy influencers worked to strengthen policy maker capacity to increase the use of evidence in policy. Activities were focused on three (interlinked) levels of capacity building: individual, organizational and, occasionally, institutional. Interventions included increasing access to research/data, promoting frequent interactions between researchers and members of the policy communities, and increasing the receptivity towards research/data in policy making or policy-implementing organizations. Teams were successful in building the capacity of individuals to access, understand and use evidence/data. Strengthening organizational capacity generally involved support to infrastructure (e.g. through information technology resources) and was also deemed to be successful. There was less appetite to address the need to strengthen institutional capacity—although this was acknowledged to be fundamental to promoting sustainable use of evidence, it was also recognized as requiring resources, legitimacy and regulatory support from policy makers. Evaluation across the three spheres of capacity building was made more challenging by the lack of agreed upon evaluation frameworks. In this article, we propose a new framework for assessing the impact of capacity strengthening activities to promote the use of evidence/data in policy making. Our evaluation concluded that strengthening the capacity of individuals and organizations is an important but likely insufficient step in ensuring the use of evidence/data in policy-cycles. Sustainability of evidence-informed policy making requires strengthening institutional capacity, as well as understanding and addressing the political environment, and particularly the incentives facing policy makers that supports the use of evidence in policy cycles.

Knowledge Translation Platform Increasing Use of Research Evidence in Physical Activity Policy Making - A Case Study in Finland

“…The results of this study support the observations on gaps by Hawkes et al (2015) in understanding the mechanisms influencing the use of research evidence on policymaking processes and how policymakers can be encouraged to use research evidence. Hardly any resources were directed at capacity development to promote greater use of research evidence in policy makers in this study either.…”

“…The study also confirmed the conclusions of Hawkes et al (2015) that policymaking processes should be strengthened through organizational capacity building and through data depositories, upgrading of institutional infrastructures and variety of multimedia/social media messages. To increase the capacity to have access to research evidence.…”

“…According to Hawkes et al (2015) the capacity for the access, analysis and interpretation of research evidence lay outside of policymakers and mostly within specialized agencies. Stakeholders have different roles in research evidence, such as identifying information and research evidence, redistribution of research knowledge and rescaling and transforming knowledge to policymakers or other people.…”

Building capacity for evidence-informed decision making: an example from South Africa

“…In certain contexts, capacity building also seems to have reached a point of decreasing returns (Kislov et al, 2014;Hawkes et al, 2015;Christoplos et al, 2014). There is a risk of building the same individual EIDM skills among the same set of decision makers (easily accessible, national level of government, well-educated, and so on) (NORAD, 2015;Christoplos et al, 2014).…”

Challenges of integrating evidence into health policy and planning: linking multiple disciplinary approaches

“…31 Some of the strategies that have been tested in intervention research include providing timely research summaries, training policy makers in critical appraisal skills, deploying knowledge brokers, facilitating proximity and dialogue between policy makers and researchers, and developing packages of interventions that address the culture of policy making settings to make them more evidence attuned. 31,32 Intervention research maintains a focus on study design and methodological rigour, but also embraces challenges of 'natural' context and increasing complexity. This can make it difficult to gain entry into such research, but we argue that it should not deter scholars and advocates for EIPM from embracing key insights from this approach.…”