Collaborative research: a tool for transforming public policies

Abstract

The Public Administration School of Catalonia (EAPC) offered a series of sessions on the interaction between politics and science and on collaborative research during the month of February. The presentations and the videos from the sessions are available on the School website. In this post we pose a series of questions and reflections that have emerged from these sessions.

Can politics be based on scientific evidence? If we were to conduct a survey today to ask whether public policies should be informed by scientific evidence, the majority of answers would probably be positive, whether they came from academics, decision makers and public employees or from citizens. However, the relationship between politics (and policies) and science (or research) is not that clear, and in practice it is very complex. Management of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 bears witness to this.