We have people here from think tanks, academia, consultancies, federal government, provincial government, NGOs, bilaterals, multilaterals – all concerned with ensuring that knowledge improves policy, practice, research, civil society etc etc. The focus of discussions has been on outcomes for people, it has been on understanding that what’s important is to conceive of the whole picture, not just a bridging function between worlds that are often represented as being separated but actually aren’t. And while we don’t have anyone from a political party, politics has certainly been a big part of discussions. And we’ve been talking web 2.0 as well as newspapers, tv, radio, drama, art and storytelling. I guess there could be a misconception that we’re trying to invent something new – but that’s not the case at all (which means we do need to work hard to overcome that misconception).

As Jason Blackstock has just said to me, K* is a community of practice not a union badge: I’m sorry if my post gave you the opposite impression! You may hate the term, but the way I look at things, you’re a K* practitioner too, Quique…

Robert Hoppe’s work on Boundary Workers is the best i have found on this issue: http://works.bepress.com/robert_hoppe1/15/ I highly recommend this work.

I feel that like many of the things we work in we are getting over exited about the term (*) and losing track of the work itself. I hope this event proves me wrong. We’ll see.

Let’s not forget that there are plenty of * out there already: think tanks are one such *: they should (emphasis on should) be simultaneously working with/in academia and policy. Special advisers are another. Parties * between policies and citizens. The media plays a * role too. Etc. by focusing on * as a separate area of expertise we risk forgetting about these other institutions. We’ll fund ‘infomediaries’ instead of public libraries (for instance to increase their online presence); or research programmes based in consultancies and NGOs instead of universities (which are necessary not just for fundamental research but also to train the next generations of researchers and policymakers and, yes, for *, too); or NGOs instead of political parties and their programmatic capacity (we may not like political parties but these are the basis of the systems of government of most -if not all- countries); or the blogs instead of the media (the real media, the newspapers that people read, the TV stations that people rush to at night, the radio stations that they listen on the bus and which are an indispensable institution for any democracy).

The challenge then is not to overdo it. To recognise that this * role is already being played by many organisations and individuals who are not * professional (does that even exist) and whose professions are vital to the functioning of society. The questions ought to be:

How do we help THEM be better *?

Thank you.

Regards,
Zeinab

To my mind, Mr Rotich’s comment that “policy is decided without research…” suggests that, in the Kenyan context, researchers and science communicators have a lot of work to do to improve the communication of research results so that policy decisions are informed by robust evidence from research instead of a situation where research findings are sought out to ‘validate’ a policy decision that has already been taken.

Tezira Lore
Communications Specialist, ILRI