There’s a growing demand for evidence of what impact environmental research is having – especially from funders.
And yet those who use the research often don’t report the impact in the way researchers expect them to according to a new study which looks at Yorkshire iCASP as science-policy network.
This analysis by Prof Julia Martin-Ortego, Prof Martin Dallimer, former iCASP impact evaluator Marie Ferre and Monico Di Gregorio will now be published in the Journal of Environmental Management.
This paper tackles some of the key challenges of evaluating and evidencing impacts arising from research.
Our aim with iCASP is to create networks to connect organisations and improve information flow between scientific researchers and practitioners who benefit from their studies. This allows us to create maximum impact.
A big thank you to all organisations participating in the iCASP network, which help us to understand how impact occurs from environmental research.
‘We aim to better understand how transfer of science in a science-policy network generates impact. Our approach relies on an exploratory social network analysis (SNA), applied to a network of organisations working on land and water management in a catchment in the UK. We analyse flows of scientific information across these organisations and how those contribute to impact, which we conceptualized as change in organisations at three levels: increased awareness, operational change and strategic change. We find that organisations occupying central positions in the network facilitate the transfer of science and influence the level of change achieved. Yet, we find that the effectiveness of the flows of information and impact delivery depends on boundary organisations, in particular public regulatory bodies, that connect agents with others. Moreover, intended change reported by science providers does not often transform directly into change as reported by the receivers of the information. We conclude that both exchanges between researchers and research users and the role of boundary organisations are key to impact delivery and making change possible. This is valuable for understanding where improvements to information flows between organisations might enhance impact.’
