Knowledge to Policy; Contributing to the Measurement of Social, Health, and Environmental Benefits

Abstract

The missions of many U.S. federal agencies include building the knowledge base for policy making. For example, the research programs of the Environmental Protection Agency inform its regulatory function; the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health provides the evidence base for safety standards in the workplace; and educational research affects educational policy as well as educational practice. Policy impacts are also important, however, for agencies with broader research missions when they want to measure the uptake of their research results in the policy process, for example, the use of environmental knowledge in climate change policy or the influence of biomedical research findings on public health standards. In general, measuring non‐economic outcomes of research has been considered particularly difficult. Cozzens and her co‐authors (Cozzens and Bortagaray 2002) have argued that the difficulty lies not in a lack of outcome measures – plenty of measures of human and environmental health exist, for example – but rather in under‐development of models of the processes that lie between research and the measured outcomes. “Intermediate” outcomes have been adopted in several recent evaluations as short‐term, relatively observable proxies for long‐term changes to which the research program aims to contribute (Committee on Evaluating the Efficiency of Research and Development Programs at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2008; Institute‐of‐Medicine 2009). Providing inputs to policy processes is one important example of such intermediate outcomes. So for example, occupational safety research must assure that its results are disseminated to the regulatory bodies that set occupational safety standards. One can “measure” whether this happened by asking the intended recipient or by checking for references in the relevant regulatory document. Intermediate outcomes like these are linked to but do not determine long‐term outcomes, since research results are almost never the only influence on the ultimate policy decisions, and the policy decisions are in turn only one influence on actual health and safety in the workplace.