PRCI webinar on research to policy influence in South and Southeast Asia
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EmailWebinar for PRCI country partners builds regional researchers’ capacity for reaching policymakers.
On June 29, 2022, a webinar was presented by MSU’s USAID funded Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy Research, Capacity and Influence (PRCI) in in coordination with Kasetsart University (KU) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for PRCI country partners from both South Asia and Southeast Asia.
The online workshop was designed as part of a Research to Policy (R2P) training program that teaches researchers how to build strategies for policy influence into empirical and rigorous research design. Participants learned techniques for how to assess and map the policy space, how to create national level policy impact, and how to multiply regional level influence. The eventual goal is for South and Southeast Asian researchers to be able to sustainably influence national and regional policy.
Kristin Davis, a Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI, and Pasakorn Thammachote, an assistant professor at KU, led the session, which started with an introductory overview of policy influence and a presentation by Davis. After a Q&A session, participants from individual countries used Padlet, a collaborative learning platform, to delve into their specific research and policy influence goals and strategies.
Research teams from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia, and India worked with the instructors to develop a working policy implementation plan for their research foci. Teams started with their research topic, then worked through outlining their policy influence goal, what stage of the policy process they wanted to influence, which policy action should be taken to reach that goal, and finally, who their target audience was. By the end of the webinar each team had developed a concrete action plan to influence policy with their research.
