Feature

Professor Wendy Graham is one of DFID's new Senior Research Fellows. She and the other fellows provide the scientific leadership for DFID's research priorities, to enhance the relevance of research and maximise its impact on development policy and practice.

The Fellows bring with them cutting-edge knowledge across the development spectrum, from state fragility and migration, to low-carbon energy and nano-technologies. There are 14 Fellows in total. Read the other interviews with Professor Ron Skeldon and Dr David J. Grimshaw, in our series of interviews with the Fellows.

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One of the challenges that all Fellows will face, however, will be to manage the different hats that they wear, even when, as Wendy says, "it's not clear even to ourselves which hat we're wearing!". She notes that "we are sort of guinea pigs, and many other bilateral agencies are looking at this with interest. I'm sure all the posts will evolve differently because the Fellows are all very different - at different points in their career as well as doing different types of work. I think it's a fantastic opportunity to witness policy processes from the inside, and hopefully influence them a bit as well."

Each Fellow has to plough their own furrow within DFID. While some work is mapped out, this is also a chance to make the most of opportunities that arise. Some Fellows will be marketing themselves to advisors, and responding as agendas change. Gratifyingly, there has already been a big demand for Wendy's time and expertise from within DFID. "I've been advising on a number of documents, commenting on new pieces of evidence, and looking for new and emerging themes in the maternal health agenda. I've represented DFID in meetings, listening and feeding back, commenting on priorities - in fact the pull from the policy team has been enormous, and interestingly has come from the country desks as well. I've visited the DFID office in Delhi to hear their views on evidence gaps in the maternal and newborn health arena. I've just reviewed a report from the DFID Nepal desk on maternal mortality too. This is all good, because much as it's enriching for me to work with Palace Street and Abercrombie House it's also good to be able to respond to demands from the field. There's a new maternal health adviser based in Nairobi and we worked together at the FIGO conference, writing the summary, so helping him - in a small way - to settle in to this new post."

EVIDENCE - WHAT IS IT, AND HOW DO WE USE IT?

Of the evidence gaps that do still exist, Wendy is particularly interested in looking at the 'evidence for evidence' in the policymaking process - how all the different pieces fit together not just in her own area of research but more widely. "With evidence gaps it's a balance - it's building the ship while sailing it - and we do need to improve our knowledge, particularly around how to change behaviour and how to scale up services. Those are gaps as well, but I'm really interested in enriching my knowledge about the bottlenecks to uptake of evidence and the interface between policy and evidence. One of the things I hope to do as an SRF is to think across the different development research areas, to do a comparative review of whether we have the same uptake bottlenecks. "

Wendy has worked with many other bilaterals and thinks that there is more of an evidence culture in DFID than in many other agencies. "There is still 'policy-based evidence-making' too," she laughs, "and I suspect that's just the reality. The speed of policy processes, the politics of policy processes, means that sometimes the policy will proceed the evidence. I don't have a particular problem with that as long as there's a corrective process - so that when evidence does indeed emerge and if it contradicts the policy or it suggests that the policy needs to be fine-tuned it happens - of course that's the bit that's less perfect."

AT THE HEART OF RESEARCH UPTAKE

The goal of DFID-funded research is to change policy for the better, to make a big difference to the way governments operate. Only if research results are meaningful in the rough world of politics will they stand a chance of informing concrete policy change. "I'm an academic through and through, but we're going to be dinosaurs unless we can understand uptake better and then position, package and translate what we do more effectively. A lot of that is communications, and for the last twelve months I've been working with advocacy groups. Advocacy has a role to play in all the MDGs but sometimes there's too much advocacy and not enough evidence. On the other hand, the advocates don't have time to read all the Lancet articles and they get very impatient with the [overcomplicated] messaging that we academics do, so it's learning how to be rather more effective and also trying to strengthen the respective understanding of each other's remits, potential, limitations, etc."

Even with the best will in the world, however, it's hard to know where to focus communications efforts. Wendy stresses that it's important not to put all your eggs in the same basket. "There's new recognition that it's not just two communities, research and policy, but a galaxy now occupied by a lot of other players - civil society, advocacy, parliamentarians - and that we researchers have to try to inform policy via direct and indirect routes." Of her work with the Initiative for Maternal Mortality Programme Assessment (IMMPACT), she adds, "Communicating is a process not an event. Keeping people interested over a four or five-year period was hard - you had to keep re-positioning, repackaging - and I hope that in future many others will go back to our data and continue to mine it."