How Much Policy Advice is Changed and Lost in Political Translation?

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Tracing the Formation and Utilization of Evidence in Nordic Education Policy

Proposal

This study looks at government-appointed advisory commissions in Norway and Sweden and investigates how and to what extent their respective government uses the evidence produced in these commissions for policy decisions. Drawing on the concepts of network governance (Ball & Junemann, 2012) and multi-centric policymaking (Cairney, Heikkila, & Wood, 2019), we compare reference patterns (1) between Green Papers and White Papers as well as (2) between Norwegian and Swedish Green Papers. Our bibliometric database is drawn from the references from two White Papers and eight Green Papers in Norway and one White Paper and eight Green Papers in Sweden that were contributory to the development of the Norwegian 2016/2020 Renewal and Improvement Reform and the Swedish 2015/2018 Knowledge Achievement Reform, respectively. By identifying knowledge shared between Green Papers and White Papers, we aim to shed light on the transfer of knowledge from the advisory body to the decision-making authority. We use the term “political translation” to denote the knowledge transfer between the two bodies. In addition, the comparison of the policy advisory systems in Norway and Sweden enables us to distill context-specific features of the policy process in each country.

The results show that the White Papers, produced by the ministries of education and science, share strikingly very few references with the Green Papers, produced by their appointed commissions. The uptake of commission report is barely visible in Norway: from the 2,106 publications amassed by the commissions to produce evidence for their reviews and recommendation, only 4 percent were also mentioned in the bibliographies of the two White Papers. The same pattern with a slightly better political uptake emerged in the Swedish case: only 38 documents out of the 1,373 references cited in commission reports made it to the political level, suggesting that a significant amount (97%) of expert knowledge was lost in political translation. Given the highly selective reception of commission reports at the political level (4% in Norway and 3% in Sweden), we also explore which ones “made” it to the political level by examining in depth those texts or studies that were cited both by the commissions as well as the ministries. Our analysis demonstrates how some knowledge gets lost, some gets rebalanced, and some gets reinterpreted.

We conclude our study by offering three broader interpretations about the role of advisory commissions in the policy process. First, the advisory commissions have been repurposed in ways that place greater emphasis on expertise rather than accountability and representation. Second, the multi-level analysis shows that the commissions merely represent one stage in a long sequence of evidence-based policy making. Finally, the transnational perspective helps us to see how advisory commissions nowadays are used as bridges between the global and the national. In particular, they review, translate, and recontextualize OECD recommendations or, in the case of the recent reform in Norway, OECD and other international frameworks, to fit into the national context.

Authors

• Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Teachers College, Columbia University & NORRAG

• Chanwoong Baek, University of Oslo

• Berit Karseth, University of Oslo

• Andreas Nordin, Linnaeus University