Policy relevance: a sceptical view

ABSTRACT

The academic international relations community has come under fire, both in Australia and overseas, for its supposed irrelevance to real-world issues. Recommendations have been made for ‘bridging’ this ‘gap’ between the scholarly and policy worlds. This article takes a sceptical look at some of these recommendations. While this article argues that international affairs academics should be judged on their ability to provide value to society, it also notes that the best way to do so is to capitalise on the academy’s comparative advantages in order to produce high-quality inputs to the public debate. This article expresses concern that some of the recommendations put forward to bridge the gap may, by compromising impartiality, excessively curtailing the time frames for good research, and neglecting theoretical and methodological rigour, run the risk of reducing academia’s value to society.

KEYWORDS:

• Academia
• international affairs
• policy relevance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Charles Miller is a lecturer at the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. He received his PhD in political science from Duke University in 2013. His research interests include military effectiveness, public opinion and research methodology. His work has appeared in Journal of Peace Research; International Journal of Public Opinion Research; International Relations of the Asia Pacific; Australian Journal of Political Science; and Australian Journal of International Affairs.

Notes

1. See ‘The Conservative Roots of Radicalism: Making Yesterday’s Universities Relevant Today’ at http://www.anu.edu.au/events/the-conservative-roots-of-radicalism-making-yesterday%E2%80%99s-universities-relevant-today.

2. For first applying the concept of comparative advantage to the academia/policy debate, I thank Johannes Urpalainen http://duckofminerva.com/2013/09/what-is-policy-relevance-and-how-should-we-reward-international-relations-scholars-for-it.html.

3. Google Trends data dates back to 2004 only, so no comparison with the immediate post-9/11 world is possible.