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Building a Bridge or Nurturing the Gap?

After finishing my PhD thesis in 2001, I decided to move from academia to government. I wanted to work in a different environment, applying the insights I had gained to the world of practical politics. But while academic research still aroused my curiosity, I quickly realized that it generally reached only a very small and select audience and was not necessarily linked to political and policy realities. The gap between policy and academy remains. Granted, nowadays much more academic and think tank work is freely available online, so the possibilities for academics to reach out and for policymakers to read their products have significantly increased. On the other hand, the pace of politics has accelerated as a result of continuous media coverage and the rise of social media. Policymakers are obliged to keep up as best as possible, which makes it more difficult for them to also keep up with academic developments. Traditional international relations (IR) concepts may implicitly affect how they understand policy problems, but policymakers rarely refer to them explicitly. Meanwhile, they find little use with the esoteric and highly theoretical articles in most IR journals. It is unclear whether the authors of such articles have any audience beyond a small group of their peers. That leads to the question of the relevance to society of scientific endeavor. In the Netherlands, over the past few years, a strong political wish has grown to have government-funded research be more ‘relevant to society.’ (There are several views as to what that means.) At the same time, there are calls from academia not to curtail funding of fundamental research in a number of sciences, whose ‘relevance’ may only reveal itself decades from now if at all but whose impact may be huge. But generally speaking, the tendency is clearly toward relevance to the challenges our society faces now and in the future. This includes the social sciences that bear on issues of strategy and policy. Thus, while society and government are pushing more relevant research, the densely theoretical work that appears in many IR journals seems to be moving in the other direction.