policy making

Reference societies and adaptive development: a conversation with Daniel Suryadarma about Indonesia’s participation in the PISA educational assessment

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During a seminar organised by the EduKnow research group at the University of Tampere on comparative education, I came across the interesting concept of reference society. In a nutshell, countries which, like Finland, find themselves at the top of the PISA ranking may become models or references for countries looking for ways to improve their education policies […]

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Knowledge, policy, and adaptive development in Indonesia. A discussion at UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti

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I was recently in Florence to meet the team at the UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti and present & discuss some of the experiences of the Knowledge Sector Initiative in Indonesia. I was part of the implementing team during phase 1 from 2013-2017 leading the research and learning work of the programme. The Knowledge Sector Initiative is

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A conversation about policy experiments

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The search for ways to design policies that help to solve societal problems is continuously evolving. The traditional evidence-based approach to policy making involves generating research results and using these to inform policy decisions. This blog post is based on an interview with Mikko Annala, Head of Governance Innovation at Demos Helsinki. It was originally posted on

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Estimating the return on investment of policy research and engagement

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by Tanty Nurhayati Djafar , Ni Wayan Suriastini , and Arnaldo Pellini Is it possible to calculate the return of investment on a research policy project? Well, the Indonesian think tank SurveyMETER and the Knowledge Sector Initiative have given it a go for a policy research project on services and infrastructure for the aging population in the Indonesian municipality of Balikpapan. Here is what

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The struggle of bringing research into climate change policy

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I read a vey interesting article in the Guardian Weekly about the struggle of science research in the United States following the election of Donald Trump as president (The climate change battle dividing trump’s America). Funding for climate change research is being cut. A climate change sceptic has been appointed as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.  A

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