A Comparative Assessment of the Production and Use of Scientific Evidence in Small Island States

This paper explores the production and use of scientific evidence for policy-making in small island states. Islands are vulnerable, raising risk and uncertainty levels. Small states have less financial and human resources when compared to larger states. Consequently, bureaucrats are often spread too thinly across various areas of responsibility. This however provides broader insights into the linkages across these various areas, allowing the opportunity for better policy integration. Furthermore, in smaller geographical territories, interaction between government, organisations and the public is facilitated as proximity to the decision-maker is accentuated, possibly rendering stakeholder influence more central to the policy process. Given this context, this paper investigates the following research question: “What instigates the production and use of scientific evidence and knowledge within public organisations in small island states?” It will present the tools, actors, political circumstances and institutional design features (and other elements that may emerge) that drive the use of science in such contexts, shedding light on the role evidence plays in policy-making. This research will be based on a comparative assessment of two European small states’ production and use of research and scientific evidence for policy-making. A grounded theory approach will be adopted for this research to allow the construction of hypotheses and theories, as concepts about the production and use of evidence in small states become apparent. Narratives drawn from interviews with policy bureaucrats working within specific policy fields (including tourism, health and environment) in the public service in Malta and Cyprus will be collected. Once saturation is reached, the data will be analysed. (Should access to bureaucrats from Cyprus prove difficult, attempts will be made to access policy bureaucrats from Iceland.) Findings might show that the production and use of evidence in small island countries follow the general theories about evidence-based policy-making. Theoretical conjectures that may be specific to the context of small states might however emerge from this research. This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on evidence-based policy-making by focusing on the role of knowledge in governance of small island states, as it presents a comparative assessment of two small states in contrast to most of the empirical research which focuses on larger jurisdictions. Patterns about the production and use of evidence across different policy fields or circumstances might emerge. A contribution to the theoretical aspects of the debate on the use of evidence might emerge from this research, extending the debate to the use of evidence in small island states. (This paper will build on and extend the paper to be presented in the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops.)