Introduction

The Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP) generates evidence that is designed to help improve both national policy and local practice. Based in Cardiff University and with core funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and Welsh Government, the WCPP was established in 2017 to build on the success of the Public Policy Institute for Wales, which was created four years earlier to provide Welsh Government ministers with authoritative independent evidence (Bristow et al, 2015). The WCPP continues to work with ministers but also provides evidence for local government, the health service and other public bodies. And rather than producing evidence and then ‘pushing’ it out to policy makers, it starts by working closely with them to identify their priorities and then generates, synthesises and mobilises evidence that addresses these issues.

The WCPP's demand-led approach is designed to increase the chances that policy makers get evidence that is relevant and timely and therefore act on it. This way of mobilising evidence is informed by the ‘two communities’ concept which makes the oversimplified, but nevertheless useful, observation that ‘social scientists and policy makers live in separate worlds with different and often conflicting values, different reward systems, and different languages’ (Caplin, 1979, p 459). There are heroic individuals who manage to straddle both worlds, but they are exceptions. Most policy makers work to much shorter timescales than researchers and they prize practical, politically expedient answers to ‘real world’ problems. By contrast, academics are rewarded for publishing theory-driven research, which can take years to produce and rarely offers straightforward answers (Oliver et al, 2014). As a result, even if policy makers are aware of evidence that is being generated in universities, they struggle to penetrate the journal paywalls it is published behind and the academic jargon it is couched in, and are unlikely to find that it offers clear-cut ‘actionable recommendations’.

In recent years, researchers in the UK have been encouraged to pay more attention to the practical implications and potential applications of their research. The UK's Research Excellence Framework, which rates each universities’ research output and allocates funding accordingly, now gives credit for impact beyond academia, and research councils ask grant recipients to specify the commercial and/or public policy benefits of their work.