Editorial: Science, Policy, and Advice. Lasting Tensions in a Symbolic Relationship

In recent years, discussions around scientific expertise and its relevance for policy making have heightened. In Austria, too, significant steps have been taken to address the role of scientific advice and its relation to science and innovation policy as well as sectoral policies. Austrian legislators have been restructuring science and innovation policy advice by merging two existing councils into FORWIT. At the same time, European efforts to better understand, and improve, science-for-policy ecosystems have begun to resonate across various policy fields. And last year, when we started to think about this special issue more concretely, the then-new government in Austria announced its plan to conduct a system evaluation of the Austrian research and innovation policy landscape. 

These developments affect what we call (as a general umbrella term) the science-policy-interface, that is all instances and spaces where science and policy come together with the ambition to utilize (scientific) knowledge for political decision-making. To us, these developments also provide an opportunity to examine how some of the most relevant and frequent emanations of this interface – namely, advisory councils and evaluation institutions – have been affected by these developments, how actors  involved in maintaining and innovating them have reacted to them, and whether these pushes to be more effective in informing policymaking are showing results. The fteval platform and FORWIT therefore decided to explore how prospective policy advice and retrospective evaluation can complement each other in the Austrian context and beyond and also aim at understanding underlying historical and institutional trajectories.