When I finished my masters in December of 2000, I was fortunate to spend the few months I had to spare until the start of my Ph.D. interning at the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
Other than a good excuse to spend the spring and part of the summer in Rome and to learn Italian, that internship did two things. First, it allowed me to learn a lot about how policy was made within the United Nations system. It then made me realize just how much I wanted to do a Ph.D.
The two are not unrelated. What cemented the two in my mind was the realization, early on in my internship, that policy making was far behind the research frontier. Having just finished my Masters, I only had a vague idea of where the research frontier lied, but even that vague idea seemed better than the research results on which United Nations (UN) development policy seemed to be based.
Not only was this understandable, it also appeared inevitable. Few people if any in the UN system had the time or the inclination to read up on the latest scientific discoveries. When they did hear about those discoveries, it was usually in the context of seminars, workshops, or conferences. Unfortunately, such events take time and money to organize, and so there was a considerable lag between research and policy.
Blogs as Catalysts
All that has changed with the advent and subsequent spread of blogs, which allow for the rapid dissemination of just about any kind of information. In the space of ten years, I have seen policy makers being only able to refer to research findings they had learned about in grad school to the same policy makers dropping the most recent research findings in casual conversation.
Although there are many blogs out there that still read like someone’s diary, there are a great many blogs whose goals include the dissemination of research results — this being one such blog in the realm of international development.
On the supply side, a blogger who wants to be read must present his or her would-be audience with news they can use, whether said news is about the latest celebrity gossip or cutting-edge research. A blogger’s incentives are thus stacked in favor of clear and concise writing. On the demand side, blogs allow those who wish to be more effective in their work to acquire and “consume” bite-sized chunks of information.
Blogs will never replace peer-reviewed journals, but they are now part and parcel of the policy research process, if only because they have substantially reduced the speed at which policy makers can assimilate research results and put them into practice.
UPDATE: The London School of Economic’s Impact of Social Sciences blog just published this interview with Austin Frakt, who blogs at The Incidental Economist with my colleague Don Taylor. Here’s the most relevant excerpt:
Consistent with all this, I read a lot of empirically-oriented academic papers and other material produced by subject-matter experts and relevant to health policy. It has a lot more to say about the likely outcomes of various policy interventions than most people realize.
But it’s not readily accessible to those it can best serve, policymakers. One way to reach policymakers is by translating the content of technical work for journalists. If journalists can understand and report on it, there is a prayer it might influence policy. As a community, health services researchers still have a long way to go in this regard. Only 0.04% (not a typo!) of published papers in health are reported on by the media. Blogs and other social media can help.
Malthus, Africa’s Albertine Rift, and Underappreciated Development Economists
From an article in the November 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine on Africa’s Albertine Rift:
By the mid-1980s every acre of arable land outside the parks was being farmed. Sons were inheriting increasingly smaller plots of land, if any at all. Soils were depleted. Tensions were high. Belgian economists Catherine André and Jean-Philippe Platteau conducted a study of land disputes in one region in Rwanda before the genocide and found that more and more households were struggling to feed themselves on little land. Interviewing residents after the genocide, the researchers found it was not uncommon to hear Rwandans argue that “war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.” Thomas Malthus, the famed English economist who posited that population growth would outstrip the planet’s ability to sustain it unless kept in check by starvation, disease, or war, couldn’t have put it more succinctly.