Effectiveness Factors and Impacts on Political Decisions of Science-Policy Interfaces in the Environmental Sustainability Context

Organizations connecting science and policy, referred to as science-policy interfaces, aim to support policymakers with decision-relevant knowledge and scientific findings. Given the rising significance of the role of evidence in decision-making in a world dealing with complex problems, a proliferation of literature has developed theories on the effectiveness of such interfaces. While there are studies providing evidence of these interfaces influencing policy, there is limited understanding on the comprehensive range of outcomes on policies among multiple science-policy interfaces. Through a systematic review, we analyzed how 69 research articles investigated the impacts on political decisions of structured science-policy interfaces related to environmental sustainability, organizing the types, effectiveness factors, outputs and impacts on political decisions of the interfaces observed. We found majority of the studies focused on global expert groups generating assessments leading to 26 occurrences of policy formulation and 12 occurrences to agenda setting, driven by the 53 instances of social learning among policymakers. There was a large proportion of references to stakeholder participation, diverse background of experts, interdisciplinarity, and the communication of complexity as factors enabling impacts on political decisions of science-policy interfaces. Further research is needed to explore the ‘fuzzy boundary’ between science and policy among different types of science-policy interfaces, the external forces influencing the relationship between SPI outputs and impacts on political decisions, and the interdependencies between effectiveness factors. By synthesizing the impacts on political decisions and associated factors of science-policy interfaces found in the literature, our review harmonizes the observations made by scholars on the effectiveness of SPIs in impacting sustainable development policies.