How science and scientists can help in new legislation and regulations?

What is it about?

The quantity and complexity of scientific and technological information pro- vided to policymakers have been on the rise for decades. Yet little is known about how to provide science advice to legislatures, even though scientific information is widely acknowledged as valuable for decision-making in many policy domains. We asked academics, science advisers, and policymakers from both developed and developing nations to identify, review and refine, and then rank the most pressing research questions on legislative science advice (LSA). Experts generally agree that the state of evidence is poor, especially regarding developing and lower-middle income countries. Many fundamental questions about science advice processes remain unanswered and are of great interest: whether legislative use of scientific evidence improves the implementation and outcome of social programs and poli- cies; under what conditions legislators and staff seek out scientific information or use what is presented to them; and how different communication channels affect informational trust and use. Environment and health are the highest priority policy domains for the field. The context- specific nature of many of the submitted questions—whether to policy issues, institutions, or locations—suggests one of the significant challenges is aggregating generalizable evidence on LSA practices. Understanding these research needs represents a first step in advancing a global agenda for LSA research.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

By collaborating with a nascent research-practice community for LSA in defining an international research agenda, we hope this project helps spur new initiatives globally on science and technology advice to inform legislatures. The linguistic and conceptual challenges encountered during the study, discussed in the previous section, highlight the need to develop a community of practitioners and scholars sharing a common set of concepts and the ability to relate those to their local context. We believe that both the product of our study and the collaborative process that led to it, are an important step in this direction. The results of the study create tangible objectives for this emergent field. Laying a cohesive groundwork for future goals in the legislative science advice (LSA) space may aid in opening new global channels of communication between scientists, legislatures, and the public that were previously unattainable. A shared set of research priorities can lay the groundwork for future collaborative research addressing the specifics of individual national systems within a common frame of reference, enabling mutual learning, and development and sharing of good practices. This could also provide the empirical basis for theoretical generalizations about the nature of scientific expertise and knowledge in legislative settings.