2.3.6 What is the goal of policy advocacy?

A common oversimplification of the very messy reality of policy change is that a policy research project is only successful if the recommendations put forward are adopted wholesale and implemented by the government, that is, that it has direct policy impact.¹ Such a view underestimates the role of multiple voices and deliberation in any policymaking process, not to mention the multiple sources of influence on the decision-making process. While some authors claim that such direct impact is more of a possibility in the transition context due to a lack of competition from other experts/research,² our experience of working with individual researchers and think tanks in the region is that the influence of policy research comes about much more slowly. This is in line with the “percolation” or enlightenment process³ where research slowly changes the language, understandings, and options available to policymakers more often than providing the direct basis for policy programming.

Therefore, in this manual, we have adopted the broader notion of policy influence to describe what the goals of an effective policy advocacy campaign should include. We use the framework developed by a leading policy scientist and practitioner⁴ to describe policy influence made up of three core elements:

• Developing policy capacities
  The development and dissemination of a policy research project can help to advance the skills and knowledge of both the researchers and organizations directly involved, but also among the target audiences for such research (for example, advisors, government officials, media). A very important aspect of this type of influence in transition countries may be the building of an understanding of and appreciation for the value of research in decisionmaking.

• Broadening policy horizons
  Although the recommendation from policy research may never become part of a target government program, they may be successful in introducing, for example, a new perspective or framing of the problem or a new policy alternative that hadn’t before been considered. Through the softening up process, this new insight will broaden the nature of the debate and become a pillar in the new conventional wisdom of the specialist community. A researcher at the International Development Research Center put it well when she said that even rejection by a policy community is in fact success in having policy influence—the fact that a justification to reject your recommendations has been developed means that policy learning has occurred.

• Having policy impact (more commonly called “affecting policy regimes” )
  As described above, this is the process through which a piece of research will be adopted as the basis for changing legislation and government programs. It should be noted that even if this does happen, it is only in rare cases that 100 percent of the recommendations are adopted.

This concept of policy influence is a much broader idea than impact and allows us to take a developmental perspective and also see more feasible goals for advocacy initiatives. The adoption of such a broad perspective may also help others involved in the production and commissioning of policy research to see more realistically the effect of their work and not be frustrated by setting the mostly unrealistic goal of direct impact.