Research findings to inform policy

Abstract

Research to inform policy is often challenged with how to genuinely use and implement research findings in decision-making and policy-planning. To begin with, the dialogue between researchers and decision-makers is essential to ensure profound understanding and legitimate interpretations of the results. Furthermore, the step to drawing practical conclusions and process them into actions can only succeed if research findings are diffused to decision-making levels with influence on the matter and mechanisms to knowledge transfer in the presence of a stable, favourable policy environment exist. Research investments into the topic of electromobility in Europe are substantial, and subtopics aiming to inform national policy-makers address a complex set of aspects from environmental and societal to technological and economic. This paper has a two-fold objective, the first of which is to present the results of scenarios to explore electromobility deployment in Finland, Germany and the European Union. The second is to discuss the challenges and solutions to bridge the gap from research findings towards decision-making and policy-planning, using our electromobility scenario work as an example. The electromobility scenarios were built using the VECTOR21 model (Mock, 2010), and the rationale was to simulate vehicle sales and markets under different policy settings and calculate the most economical solution to fulfil regulation on CO2 emissions as set by the European Commission (2009). The model allows calculating the market diffusion of alternative powertrain technologies to the European market until 2030, taking into account different taxation schemes, incentives and other country-specific characteristics. We also present the cost-benefit-analysis of the modelling results to assess the different scenarios and to show variation between regions regarding profitability of alternative technological or political support and interventions. To proceed from research findings towards decision-making and policy-planning, we made observations relating to transfer of research knowledge and interpretation of our electromobility scenario results in national policy contexts. An evaluation of how the function of research to inform policy in this case succeeded is provided. In addition, the influence of expert opinions on the political decision-making process will be discussed through experiences from an expert questionnaire conducted to survey the importance of costs, time requirement, acceptance and other criteria of promotion measures of electromobility.