Barriers to evidence use for sustainability - blogpost and article
Hofmann, Benjamin
Dear all,
I would like to share a new interdisciplinary article published open access in Ambio on the barriers to evidence use for sustainable policy and practice (abstract below). Our interdisciplinary group of researchers outlines barriers rooted in different actor motivations and then illustrates them for the example of pesticide risk reduction. As this topic is relevant beyond the pesticide case, we would be interested in receiving any reactions you might have via personal e-mail to me.
We also summarized our main points in a blogpost for the European Commission’s platform on Knowledge for Policy, which may be an easy read for students as preparation for in-class discussions about the role of science in environmental policymaking and beyond: https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/blog/barriers-evidence-use-sustainability-pesticide-case_en
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Barriers to evidence use for sustainability: Insights from pesticide policy and practice
Calls for supporting sustainability through more and better research rest on an incomplete understanding of scientific evidence use. We argue that a variety of barriers to a transformative impact of evidence arises from diverse actor motivations within different stages of evidence use. We abductively specify this variety in policy and practice arenas for three actor motivations (truth-seeking, sense-making, and utility-maximizing) and five stages (evidence production, uptake, influence on decisions, effects on sustainability outcomes, and feedback from outcome evaluations). Our interdisciplinary synthesis focuses on the sustainability challenge of reducing environmental and human health risks of agricultural pesticides. It identifies barriers resulting from (1) truth-seekers’ desire to reduce uncertainty that is complicated by evidence gaps, (2) sense-makers’ evidence needs that differ from the type of evidence available, and (3) utility-maximizers’ interests that guide strategic evidence use. We outline context-specific research–policy–practice measures to increase evidence use for sustainable transformation in pesticides and beyond.
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Best regards,
Benjamin
°°°
Dr. Benjamin Hofmann
Postdoc
Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology
Umweltsozialwissenschaften / Environmental Social Sciences
Überlandstrasse 133
8600 Dübendorf
Schweiz / Switzerland
Tel.: +41 (0) 58 765 5948
benjamin...@eawag.ch