SIP Talks
Navigating “impact”
Social Science, Public Policy, and the Path to Meaningful Change
In his talk, Claudio Radaelli will critically explore the approaches to measuring policy impact, drawing on both the literature on knowledge utilisation and the international experience.
Academic excellence, engagement, social relevance, and impact make up a vocabulary we have adopted to grasp the effects of social sciences on public decisions. Apart from the specific domain of political marketing and social sciences utilised in electoral campaigns and political communication in general, in this talk we look at the wider territory of public policy decisions. Some countries like the UK have institutionalised mechanisms to detect, measure, and reward (financially) departments and social scientists who provide ‘impact’ – with mixed results. Some universities are proceeding independently from institutional incentives, with internal and external evaluations of ‘impact’.
In this talk we will critically explore the approaches to measuring policy impact, drawing on both the literature on knowledge utilisation and the international experience. The talk will address the following questions: what do we know about how impact takes place? Where does it originate, how can it be nurtured? How do we trace causality and demonstrate impact? What are the implications for social scientists, universities, institutions, and policy design? Although the talk is grounded in my experience as a social scientist, I believe that some arguments I will air can be applied more generally to all sciences.
Ressources
About the person
Claudio Radaelli
Claudio M Radaelli is full-time professor at the Florence School of Transnational Governance, European University Institute, Florence. He was Professor of Public Policy at University College London, University of Exeter and University of Bradford. Author of two impact case studies for the discipline of political science for the Research Excellence Framework in the UK, Claudio has authored several peer-reviewed articles on knowledge utilisation. He has also contributed to the P-Cube project funded by the European Commission, by developing serious games that show how sciences can make an impact on public policy decisions – the article about games is available here.