The origins of this book lie in a joint research project, which brought together all but two of its contributors. The KNOWandPOL consortium was funded by the European Commission under its Sixth Framework Programme between 2006 and 2011, and involved 12 teams from eight European countries. We set out to investigate the ways in which knowledge is produced and used in policymaking in different contexts: we focused on the health and education sectors, and were interested in their local, national and international dimensions.

During the project's design and specification phase, we talked much about policy, not least because we knew how to do so. We talked less about knowledge, perhaps precisely because we had no readily available language in which to problematise and discuss it. Nevertheless, although our research questions were undoubtedly ambitious, they did not seem intrinsically or unduly problematic. Like many of our research subjects – and, indeed, like most people most of the time – we took knowledge for granted.

As soon as we began to analyse our data, however, it was clear that we had to know what knowledge was in a much more specific, substantial and coherent way, one that might apply across countries and contexts but still capture the various dynamics of particular settings. To speak in terms of professional, administrative or lay knowledge, or of information, experience and scientific research, was only to reify the nebulous and invariably mixed categories used by our participants. We began instead to think in terms of the form that knowledge takes, whether apparently embodied in human beings, embedded in texts and instruments, or emergent in practice. Our theoretical basis for doing so, and its potential implications and applications, are what is set out in this volume.

The book begins with an introductory chapter that sets out the framework we used for thinking about knowledge in policy. The subsequent, substantive chapters are then ordered in three parts. These present our typology and how it works in different settings, explore its three component elements in detail, and discuss problems in (and the politics of) the relationship between them. Part One shows how our model can be used to map a policy domain, in this case, mental health in Scotland (Chapter Two), as well as chart the inherently labile process of regulation in action, in respect of the evaluation of Portuguese schools (Chapter Three).