Practices in Public Agencies’ R&D Departments

Many public agencies have specialised departments that carry out a number of tasks related to research and development (R&D). With an ever-increasing emphasis on using research as “evidence” for policy, the number of such departments is on the rise, not least in countries like Norway with a strong public sector and a continuous political call for innovation, for keeping costs under control and for basing services on the best available knowledge. We know quite a lot about the use of experts in policymaking, especially in visible arenas such as public commissions and documents (Christensen & Holst 2017). What we know less about is how the public R&D departments work in practice. In this paper, we are in particular interested in how they combine the quest for gaining new knowledge with the assignment of putting the knowledge into use in the agency and on policymaking arenas. We call this combination “hybrid practices” (Gulbrandsen et al. 2015), and we want to explore characteristics of such practices (or lack thereof). In general, we can distinguish between two main types of tasks for public agency R&D units. The first is to acquire new knowledge relevant for the agency through collaboration with external research environments, procurement of R&D services and own activities such as generating statistics, analyses and in-house research. Such practices most often require formal R&D competences, other forms of absorptive capacity and close ties to external research organisations. The second type concerns putting the research into use in various ways, including transforming research results into new procedures, guidelines or principles, ensuring that policies are in line with the knowledge provided by the agency and to provide policy advice to policymakers. This most likely requires intimate knowledge of the needs and challenges of the agency or the sector for which it is responsible, the ability to influence plans and budgets, and connections to practitioners or users as well as to top-level bureaucrats and politicians. We see these two tasks as very different from one another, and since they are both found within the same organisational setting, we take as a starting point that the public agency R&D departments can be considered hybrid organisations. This means that they combine traits from two different institutional settings, in our stylised view, a research setting and a policy-practitioner setting (health, education, welfare, transport etc.). We are not interested in the departments’ status as hybrid organisations per se, but in how they combine their two main tasks in practice and the logics underpinning their practices. This question will be explored through interviews with a number of Norwegian R&D departments in directorates governing policy areas related to welfare issues in winter/spring 2019, where we have started with the R&D department of the Welfare and Labour Directorate (NAV).