As prior blogs in this series have shared, the three ways prior research has found to facilitate evidence use is creating useful, relevant research, sharing that evidence in the context of a trusted relationship, and embedding evidence use into existing organizational routines. Often the discussions related to supporting the use of evidence in policymaking focus on the researchers themselves, what research they produce or how they conduct their work or how they can better connect with policymakers. The discussion rarely looks at the role of funders of the research. At the same time, funders of science and evidence-related activities are critical players in the overall evidence building and use system.
As Arnott and colleagues point out, research funders have a critical role in setting the scientific agenda and priorities, setting criteria by which proposals are funded, incentivizing how science is enacted, and coordinating across funders to amplify priorities. Funders of science and evidence-related activities have the ability to fund and prioritize activities that facilitate evidence use including engaged research practices (a broad, encompassing term for co-produced types of science), organizational infrastructure to build and use evidence, and efforts to build capacity of knowledge producers and users to understand how to use evidence. This blog will highlight how funders play an important role in supporting evidence use.
I had the pleasure recently of working with colleagues across public and private funders to develop a call to action to incentivize engaged research and support the infrastructure to do engaged research well. (Engaged research is an overarching term we used that includes research-practice partnerships, community-engaged research, co-production, transdisciplinary research, collaborative science and integrated knowledge translation. The idea is engaged science supports relevant research that is generated in the context of a trusted relationship.) Below I will broadly discuss some of the points in the article but encourage you all to access and read the full paper, which includes interesting case studies and examples from public and private funders.
The paper “How and why funders support engaged research ” focuses on key phases of the funding cycle with interesting examples across public and private funders in each area:
- identifying funding priorities (including potential users and those impacted by research help set priorities);
- setting expectations through funding criteria (to incentivize high-quality research collaboration);
- assessing quality of proposals for engaged science (including the involvement of intended users or those with lived experience to help evaluate proposals);
- supporting implementation of engaged science and the capacity to do it well; and
- evaluating process and impact (to build knowledge about how the process of doing engaged science is working — what is quality engaged science and how is it contributing to the outcomes we care about?).
Funders can support engaged research through incentivizing it in the call for proposals, such as OPRE’s long-standing Child Care Research Partnership grants, and through ensuring the review criteria for grants and contracts highlight proposals that aim to support authentic active engagement. Through providing financial support for, and encouragement of, engaged research, funders send a signal about its importance in creating more relevant, useful research. Through embedding the quality of and value for authentic engaged research, funders signal to the field how to conduct partnership-based approaches. A recent working paper on the role of funders in engaged science highlighted the unique value of communicating the value of engaged practices and creating enabling conditions for effective engaged science.
Funders can also be key partners in building and leveraging the conditions that support evidence use, facilitating relationships and routines. Infrastructure to enact evidence use includes capacity building and financial support for relationship-based work , as just discussed, as well as identifying and facilitating opportunities for use. Funders can support the development and training of individuals in the field , including staff at funding organizations, to maximize their added value as well as enhance the capacity of researchers producing evidence and individuals using evidence. This includes creating career pathways of people involved in engaged science and for those acting as boundary spanners between worlds. Funders themselves can be boundary spanners. The Lenfest Ocean Program at Pew Charitable Trusts found their grant-making staff were critical partners in bridging between the science and decision-makers by monitoring policy developments and opening policy windows and acting as knowledge brokers connecting the evidence producers and users at key moments. Funders can also partner in providing implementation support , working closely with program partners to identify whether and how to apply evidence to a particular situation. OPRE staff play a similar role listening to program partners and policymakers, identifying opening policy windows, and connecting science and pressing questions at the right moment to make the science most useful to decision-makers.
Funders need to not only support research on the conditions that support evidence use but also need to evaluate their own efforts to support useful, used science. By fostering learning through evaluating their own investments, the field overall can begin to learn what are the most effective funding practices to support evidence use . Funders may want to develop their own impact agenda to understand how to measure the impact of their funded research and use empirical research to drive investment strategies in what is most effective. For example, OPRE has begun to examine our own practices such as within specific portfolios, within our conferences, and in other ongoing work to examine whether and how our work has been used in the early childhood policy space (to be discussed in a future blog).
As one example of how a funder, OPRE, can integrate and support practices in line with the PNAS paper , can be found in a new brief from our Advancing Contextual Analysis and Methods of Participant Engagement Project, which used a Community Advisory Board, provides recommendations to OPRE on how to better support engaged research. The project recommended ACF consider continuing to build funding announcements that call for community-engaged methods; providing longer-term funding periods, including projects with multiple phases to allow for the time needed to build authentic partnerships; and ensure federal funding staff are supportive and knowledgeable about how to support this kind of work. With this project and others, we continue to consider and leverage our role as funders to advance this important work.
I would encourage you all to read the full article and, if you are a funder, join us in advancing strategies to support producing useful evidence and facilitating evidence use!
Lauren Supplee is ACF’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning, Research, and Evaluation in OPRE.