Building knowledge services for and with policy makers – not a cookbook

Although policy makers and researchers regularly collaborate in the innovation ecosystem wherein processes of co-design and implementation enable and empower a broad set of actors to contribute to sustainable development, the need remains to address the lack of knowledge about how governments and societies can respond to the ever-changing requirements for ensuring sustainability. The need for – and added value of – science-based support therein is clear: policy practitioners at all levels face the task of understanding, fighting and adapting to climate change for example, with little capacity to collect knowledge and make it actionable.
In reaction to this shortage of capacity, the capitalization of lessons learnt by researchers innovation programs and projects into easy, ready-made answers is increasingly often demanded by policy makers for internal and external use. Yet, this does not tackle the multiple root causes of the problem. This inadequacy, the resulting implementation gap, and demand and proposals for science-based support are of course not new, and have been discussed before. Yet, the urgency to provide an answer to it is rising since transformative innovation has become the corner stone of the EU Green Deal.
A ‘challenge-led approach’ is one specific kind of research involvement that might however bridge the sketched implementation gap. This involvement is quite different from that of conventional science-based projects. After all, sustainability transitions are, in contrast to conventional problems, ill-defined challenges. Establishing a research and development approach that is suitable to tackle them, requires therefore a non-conventional co-creative collaboration between researchers and policy makers. In this approach, the only thing that connects both parties is the challenge that must be resolved. Hence, a ‘challenge-led’ knowledge service.
In a common search for actionable knowledge, this challenge-led approach was developed in an iterative fashion during projects and programs under the umbrella of the EIT Climate KIC Transitions Hub and its local partners. To consolidate temporarily this development process in a strategic way for researchers, the present paper gathers the intelligence of a community of practice that has been working according to this challenge-led approach since 2012. It builds on the experience of more than 30 actions in numerous European cities, regions and states, and relates to theoretic foundations on sustainability transitions and participatory action research.
This consolidation puts forward three key mechanisms of the challenge-led collaboration at the science-policy interface: the role of and relation between researchers and policy practitioners; the process structure and according interactions; and the process outcomes and their reception. These discussions teach us that the development of the challenge-led approach is in its essence based in the management of learning processes. It does however not provide final recipes since the replication of an earlier collaboration does not warrant any success during the following collaboration.