SRCD Day 3: Why don't policymakers listen?

Alice Wolf is a State Representative in the Massachusetts legislature. She is the 'go to' person in the State House of Representatives on questions of research and prevention.

In a workshop that might have been titled 'why don't policy makers listen' Alice described her work. She deals with 200 emails a day. If the message is not in the body of the email, she probably will not get to it. Too much evidence is too many clicks away from its potential reader.

Alice is pro research and pro prevention. But she says policy makers need concise research, clear outcome measures and an idea about how things cost. As she says, 'we make policy through budgets'.

One person who seems to get this is Jack Shonkoff. Building on the well received National Academy book From Neurons to Neighbourhoods, Shonkoff, Professor at Harvard, is chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child [1].

The starting point for Shonkoff is to get scientists to agree on what we know and what we don't know. This is a painstaking task, undertaken in private session, in which a group of leading researchers go through the evidence line by line.

The breakthrough for Shonkoff has been working with communications experts. Collaborating with the FrameWorks Institute [2] in Washington DC, Shonkoff learned to focus the work of his committee on people that make strategic decisions about the allocation of resources.

The result has been a series of meetings with policy makers around the United States, Alice Wolf included. He starts off by saying to groups of policy makers 'put your ideological issues (its all about parenting, or its all about education and so on) to one side while we give you some evidence.

The evidence they get is 'ready for prime time,' meaning nearly all scientists agree that it is reliable. Thanks to FrameWorks, he knows before he gets into the room what policy makers will be thinking. And then he uses the dialogue to form strategic partnerships with them.

The sophistication of the US evidence and policy application has to be admired. But one also has to ask why with all this quality, the well-being of US children is practically at the bottom of the UNICEF league table for rich countries.