Science for Policy

Should scientists get involved in public campaigning, lobbying or advocating for causes close to their heart — or close to their research? If so, what are the responsibilities of scientists and their employing institutions — and what are the potential pitfalls? In this episode, Toby Wardman takes a deep dive into these questions with Professor Eric Guilyardi, a member of the ethics committee of th...

We often shine the spotlight on the advisors whose high-profile work comes at the end of the science advice process, and on the academics whose research it's based on. But there is a third important actor in this process, often working informally, sometimes moving in the shadows – the faceless bureaucrat or administrator. Alessandro Allegra dedicated his PhD studies to analysing the role of scienc...

People are forever saying that science advice should not just be about the natural sciences, but also about the social sciences, humanities and arts. And yet lumping those three categories together conceals a host of interesting complications. The contribution of the social sciences and humanities to policymaking is relatively easy to conceptualise, even if sometimes challenging in execution. But...

Karen Yeung is an interdisciplinary professor at the University of Birmingham, specialising in AI. In this episode, she discusses with Toby Wardman the uses of AI in evidence-based policymaking, and the uses of evidence in AI policymaking.

Mikel Landabaso, Director for Fair and Sustainable Economy in the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, knows a fair few things about the role of science and technology innovation in informing regional development policy and promoting regeneration. In this episode, he talks to Toby Wardman about how it works, how his advice has been taken, and the strategies to adopt when policymakers or st...

How do you bring scientists and policymakers together to generate creative solutions to thorny problems? How can you engineer a conversation on controversial issues that builds trust between allies rather than alienating opponents? And what's the secret to overcoming cynicism about either the process or the outcome?   With a background in history, business and journalism, Maggie Dugan has wisdom t...

The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters has been active in the science-for-policy space in Finland for decades, including in recent years playing a leading role in setting up an important science advice mechanism for the Finnish government. Now it has also published a comprehensive handbook for researchers, with advice and practical exercises to help guide them in their first steps in policy en...

What does our most advanced AI, trained on the sum total of all human knowledge, have to say about the challenges of the science-policy interface? And can it tell a good joke? (Hint: The answer to that one is no.)

Welcome to our 100th episode! This one comes to you complete with a live audience at the University of Helsinki, kindly hosted by the SRI Congress 2024. Debating questions Warm-up debates: (1) We should get rid of daylight saving time. (2) How would a dog wear trousers? Hind legs only, or all four legs on the bottom half of its body? (3) In which order do you put on socks and shoes? Sock sock shoe...

There are many different ways to make policies, and many different ways for science and evidence to impact on those policies. In western liberal democracies, we tend to focus on our specific, forgetting that across the world and across history our specific way of doing things is not the only way.   Claudia Chwalisz, from the think-tank DemocracyNext, has spent a lot of time thinking about alternat...

In recent months, there's been a small explosion of guidelines and handbooks on how to do science advice. In today's episode, Toby Wardman takes a deep dive into Science Europe's recent guidance for research-funding and research-performing organisations, in conversation with their author, Nicola Dotti.

This is probably the last podcast in the world to get round to talking about how AI is changing the world -- but we wanted to wait until we had the right people in the room to talk specifically about AI in relation to science, policy, and science-for-policy. If you like this conversation with Professor Andrea Rizzoli and Manuel Kugler -- and you will like it! -- stay tuned in the coming months, be...

It's sometimes easy to forget that even the most well-designed science advice institution, and even the most persuasive advisor, are still operating as part of a broad ecosystem in which both policymakers and the general public are exposed to vast quantities of ostensibly factual information of varying quality, much of it mediated through algorithms. In this episode, Caitlin Chin-Rothmann from the...

Why does evidence sometimes land and sometimes not? Why do some policies fail even though the evidence suggests they should succeed?  And what can we do about it? Saying "it's all about the context" is easy, but what does this actually mean? And more importantly, how can we make that into a useful insight in advance, rather than just a post-hoc justification for things not working out? Vanesa Weyr...

Politicians don't really have a great understanding of the citizens they serve, according to Michael Bang Petersen. In place of evidence from decades of psychological research, they tend to substitute their own instincts and common sense, together with more or less apposite fragments of behavioural science and economics. Nowhere was this more evident than during the early days of the Covid-19 pand...

When countries set themselves ambitious targets such as the UN sustainable development goals, then realise they don't have the evidence sources they need to monitor progress towards those targets, how do they square the circle? In some cases, it's with so-called 'citizen science', in which non-professional scientists gather and evaluate data — often on a big scale — to fill the gaps.   Dr Dilek Fr...

How do scientific models inform policymakers? How can they keep countries honest in international climate negotiations? When is uncertainty not so much of a problem? And how much does it matter if policymakers don't instantly grasp the ins and outs of a model which takes six months for scientists to learn? Join the SAM's Toby Wardman on a deep dive into what happens when scientific models meet int...

Climate change negotiators preparing for UN summits must sift through a truly intimidating quantity of scientific material to familiarise themselves with the latest evidence. That's why Future Earth, along with the Earth League and the World Climate Research Programme, has delivered its pithy 'Ten New Insights on Climate Change' every year since 2017. But what is the process behind these reports?...

Dr Patricia Gruber is the science and technology advisor to Antony Blinken, President Biden's secretary of state. In a wide-ranging conversation with Toby Wardman from the SAM, she discusses how she got her job, what it's like, and what she can and can't do. She also lays out the US's approach to international science diplomacy, including the wisdom (or folly) or withholding scientific collaborati...

International development is a major political priority in many countries, with billion-dollar budgets. But, as recently as 2006, the influential Center for Global Development published a damning report entitled 'When will we ever learn?', essentially arguing that the entire policy area had been built on a foundation of guesswork and good intentions.   In the two decades since then, a huge amount...

Dr Maja Fjaestad, an academic with an engineering background, had grand plans when she was appointed Swedish state secretary for health. Unfortunately, this was in 2019, and less than a year later her job was completely transformed by the Covid outbreak.   In this wide-ranging interview with Toby Wardman, Dr Fjaestad talks about what it was like being in the job during Covid, how well the science-...

In this special episode of the podcast recorded at a live event in 2023, four experts discuss the role of science advice in emergency situations: what challenges do science advisors face, and what opportunities should they seize? With Tina Comes, professor at Technical University Delft; Barbara Prainsack, professor at the University of Vienna and chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science an...

In a scientific field as complex and multifaceted as climate modelling, how do you communicate the realities of concrete impacts to stakeholders and policymakers? Two IPCC scientists, Bart van den Hurk and Jana Sillmann, are working on so-called 'storylines' techniques, which generate high-resolution, interdisciplinary stories to help decision-makers in all fields assess their own readiness for cl...

How diverse are the people who work on scientific advice -- and why does this matter? Should we be involving more young people as experts, and are there any trade-offs in doing so? What impact might changes in academic culture more broadly have on the quality and availability of evidence for policy? Professor Moniek Tromp, a founding member of the Young Academies Science Advice Structure and a mem...

Beyond the world of institutional design and formalised competences that tend to be the focus of science-for-policy scholarship, there are many less structured interfaces between the worlds of research and policymaking. One such well-established interface is the Mercator science-policy fellowship, run by three German universities and headed by Tome Sandevski. In this episode, Toby Wardman of the S...