• “THE FACT THAT WE’RE HERE TELLS US THAT POLITICIANS ARE AWARE THAT WE SHOULD BE INVOLVED.”

    MAKING POLICY AS GOOD AS ITS WORD

    ETF PROMOTES EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY MAKING IN THE WESTERN BALKANS

  • Links between research and policy making in the Western Balkans have yielded some impressive results in recent years. Reforms are in progress, but more research evidence is needed to inform policies and links between research analysis centres and the policy world need to be developed. Recent efforts to promote ETF-commissioned research results to a political audience may hold clues to how such links can be strengthened.

    Information and policy go hand in hand. Information is needed to feed policy development, to monitor policy implementation and to evaluate the effect of policies. But in the short term, information costs both money and time. This can jeopardise its popularity among policy makers who work with stringent budgets and relatively short political mandates.

    “The Western Balkans have experienced deep crisis and post-conflict trauma where the logic of first planning and then implementing evidence-based policies in education has been displaced by the need to tackle urgent issues,” according to Lida Kita, who works in the ETF Operations Department on projects related to the Western Balkans.

    “Most policy making is done in a very disorderly, ad hoc and often highly improvised way. Countries often do not know to what extent the policies they implement achieve their objectives and if they do know that objectives were not reached, they lack the evidence to explain why,” she says.

    In other parts of the world this may be because of a lack of research capacity but not so in the Western Balkans where the biggest hurdle is the weak link between research centres and the policy world.

    The ETF helps to mobilise local research capacity and link it to policy making. In the Western Balkans, a recent flagship example of this has been its work in promoting inclusive education. This project used local research capacity in all countries involved, overseen by the Belgrade-based Centre for Education Policy.

  • One of its focal areas was teachers’ competences for inclusive education. The ETF has now used its networks and lobbying force to promote a better link with policy making in precisely this field, most recently by presenting the results of the study to a regional ministerial conference on teachers’ transversal competences in Belgrade on 25 and 26 January.

    The meeting revealed many signs that the political will to involve the research community more closely in policy making is there.


  • “At least the fact that we’re here tells us that politicians are aware that we should be involved,” said Natasha Pantic of the Centre for Education Policy. She had been invited as a local representative of the ETF project.

    But listening to researchers is one thing. Heeding their advice is a different thing altogether and more often than not, new policies are introduced on the fly because an urgent need arises and neither time nor money is available to research different options. Ms Pantic, however, does not believe politicians alone are at fault.

    “Many researchers work in isolation and without much awareness of current agendas. Also, they typically do not approach research from an interdisciplinary angle, while this is quite badly needed. In that respect research from NGOs often better matches current policy making.”

  • Borčo Aleksov of the Ministry of Education and Sciences in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia has another reason why it can be tricky for politicians to consult traditional research communities.

    “Much of the research we need directly affects the sector in which the researchers that carry it out operate. When we looked at ways of depoliticising the teaching profession, all we received from the academic community was rubbish. In the end, the entire reform was developed within the ministry.”

  • While other authorities have had more success with involving the research community, incidental examples of good practice are no guarantee that the use of evidence in policy making will yield the desired results, according to Pawel Zgaga, director of the Centre for Educational Policy Studies at the University of Ljubljana.

    “In most countries you can see good examples of research-based policy development. But more often than not, the proposed policies are being blocked in parliament. So what you get is that policy planning is OK, but the implementation is thwarted because highly specialist issues are decided on by relatively lay people in national parliaments.”

    So what does Mr Zgaga think is needed?

    “Historical luck,” he laughs, before continuing on a more serious note.

    “We need time. When the same experts can work on the same issues for some time you can see results.”

  • “Yet, in the real world there will always be certain policy processes that won’t follow a rational model,” says Lida Kita.

    “Solutions may precede problem definition and important players may have good reasons for lobbying solutions that are unrelated to declared strategic policy outcomes. External factors or stakeholders may also impose policy directions.”

    In spite of that simple fact of political life, the ETF will continue to strive to support research communities in the Western Balkans to better prepare them for a more proactive role in policy making.

    According to Lida Kita, this means generating focus because there is a clear tendency to continually realign both research and policy to different donors’ priorities.

    “We also need more formal mechanisms to help research communities to interact with authorities. And because the topics discussed are so specialist, another priority in the immediate future will be to link these communities with international research networks. Regional cooperation gives them strength in numbers, better access to information, more visibility, and more credibility for informed policies by governments and donors.”

  • by Ard Jongsma, ICE

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