Knowledge to Policy: Making the Most of Development Research

Does research influence public policy and decision-making, and if so, how? This long debated question continues to be the subject of discussions among scholars, researchers and the international community of development agencies, donors and practitioners. For development agencies and donors, responses to this debate contribute to the larger question of how development aid affects public policies in the South. In over 35 years of supporting research in the South, Canada′s International Development Research Centre has gained considerable experience in fostering research-policy links and carried out a learning-oriented evaluation to observe whether and how the research it was supporting was influencing public policy and decision-making.

Knowledge to Policy: Making the Most of Development Research encapsulates results of the evaluation and presents the key findings and summaries of 22 case studies from Asia, Africa and Latin America. It also addresses the methodology used in a reader-friendly, journalistic style, giving the reader a deeper grasp and understanding of the approaches, contexts, relationships and events. No other research-for-development publication has assessed such a wide variety of case studies of experiences from the developing world.