Coordination of research, policy and practice: a case study of collaboration in the field of public health

Abstract

Public health policies and services are increasingly scrutinized for their quality and accountability and ‘evidence-based’ ways of working are becoming more important in most public sector activities. In the Netherlands this led to the development of academic collaborative centers (ACCs) for public health: formal, long-term collaborations between municipal health services, university departments and other stakeholders. In this paper we argue that discussing issues of research uptake or research utilization in terms of ‘gaps’ that need to be ‘bridged’ is unproductive when analyzing structural collaborations or partnerships between researchers, policy-makers and practitioners. Within collaborative settings such as the ACCs, the clear distinction between what counts as ‘science’ and what counts as ‘policy’ is only one side of the story. We use the notions of ‘boundary organization’ and ‘front stage and back stage settings’ to analyze a case study of a collaborative project conducted within one of the ACCs.

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