Nowadays, the usefulness of research for strategic policy making has been limited because polity researchers believe that they can make their efforts more useful by focusing on instrumental knowledge use. While such efforts may be appropriate for the ...
Nowadays, the usefulness of research for strategic policy making has been limited because polity researchers believe that they can make their efforts more useful by focusing on instrumental knowledge use. While such efforts may be appropriate for the use of research results to well-structured public policy problems, they are likely to be inappropriate in providing meaningful knowledge for ill-structured policy problems. As such, the challenge facing researchers is to investigate carefully the factors that affect use(or limited use) of appropriate research-based knowledge in ill-structured public policy problems if efforts to improve use are to be succeeded. This essay argues that policy making contexts and policymakers' frames of reference as well as user construct approach are critical determinants that should be incorporated into the process of knowledge use problem. Based on these perspectives, the stakeholder-based approach is suggested as strategies to couple existing experiential knowledge and the production of new research-based knowledge for policymakers' needs, because this process would be more congruent with the information requirement for dealing with ill-structured policy problems which are uniquitous features in the making of contemporary public policy.