Statement of Issues and Justification

The research base addressing the nature and effectiveness of engagement of university information and other resources by local policy/decision makers is thin. Too many faculty, Extension and outreach efforts involving local officials are based by default on localized experience and ad hoc “learning by doing”. While many such efforts are successful and important, the thin research base on which they rest is at odds with fundamental principles for university education and outreach. Supporting local decision-making with the best available research and evidence-based knowledge, and increasing the return on investment in research and outreach are key proposal goals. More systematic, cumulative attention to research on this topic by a multistate community of researcher-practitioners will strengthen the relation between the Academy and local policy decisions. The Community and Regional Development Institute’s (CaRDI) pilot project highlights the importance of informed decision-making for a) “clean science communication environments” (versus polluted science communication environment wherein the science has become entangled with peoples’ core and group identities, values and belief systems in ways that trigger the heavily distorting information filters of “motivated reasoning”, and b) research/evaluation of practices (especially by university-based educators) that are effective in protecting/restoring such environments, especially when controversial, potentially “culturally polarizing” issues like climate change are involved. Our proposed project will coordinate research on academia’s role in the maintenance and restoration of these clean science communication environments, focusing on the important role of trusted “intermediaries” in the poorly documented information chains that link university faculty, researchers and local decision makers. Our proposal, based on a research design which include a series of primary data collection methods and multi-iterative network analyses, will provide new mechanisms and strengthen shared research-based understandings to enhance the capacity of intermediaries, and to more systematically leverage their work. We consider work in this area to be in a theory building phase. With a multistate collaboration building on strong existing applied research agendas, we plan to test fundamental hypotheses about how research can best inform policy decisions. Testable hypotheses will be based on a thorough synthesis of existing and emergent theory.

The need, as indicated by stakeholders

Local officials allocate resources and make key decisions regarding complex, challenging issues. After decades of sustained devolutionary policies at the federal and state levels, the range of responsibilities and expectations of local government in relation to their resources and capacities has probably never been greater. Increased fiscal constraints and heightened political tensions demand greater accountability and efficiency, pressuring officials to work more efficiently and collaboratively, and to be well-informed. In turn, land grant institutions, along with other universities, need to ensure that the research, data, information and programming they produce to inform and support local decisions are relevant and accessible while conforming to academic standards. We view informed decision-making as an intentional and thoughtful process that includes the consideration of current research and other evidence-based information as a critical step in local decision-making.

While there are multiple stakeholders in informed local decision making, we have an ultimate interest in the decisions made by local officials and the community members that elect them, and have already engaged supportive advisory committee members from organizations representing county officials at both state and national levels (NYS Association of Counties, National Association of Counties). However, the most proximate stakeholders of our proposal are the academics and Cooperative Extension educators who have the intention or mission to engage with local officials. The proposed Multistate Research Project group will connect with local officials and other community leaders, Extension educators, outreach specialists and engaged faculty. The CaRDI collaboration with the national Local Government Extension Training network provides a clear avenue for taking this connection to a multi-state and/or national scale.

Our current practice, partnerships and review of the literature collectively highlight the need for a) further research on the need for, characteristics of, and implications for informed decision making of “clean science communication environments” and b) research/evaluation of practices (especially by university-based educators) that are effective in protecting/restoring such environments.

The research “need” is expressed differently by local officials, by Extension educators and by researchers and faculty, each of whom are involved in a communications network or chain of interactions that involves individuals and institutions who generate knowledge and awareness, convey and transform it, and “put it to work”. From a traditional policy education perspective, we are looking at the needs along a spectrum that includes identification of a topic, the process for gathering and engaging with information and data, framing and interpreting the data, identifying a range of solutions, and finally making a decision. We are particularly interested in further research on the roles of Extension educators and faculty. But these roles do not exist in a vacuum, as trust and relationships are paramount (a finding supported by our research to date). Ultimately, our interest is in learning about ways to strategically improve practice and institutions so as to better shape and respond to the interests of decision makers themselves in making informed decisions, particularly when the local context can make the issue controversial and the ensuing debate polarized.

Key research questions this project addresses:

a. How are university-based information, research, outreach and community engagement efforts viewed, accessed, interpreted and used by decision-makers dealing with pressing, complex, and sometimes controversial issues?

b. How do the tensions and conflicts that often exist between data, research, politics, experience, ideology, values and opinion play out in the decision-making process of local government officials?

c. How can the land grant mission, as carried out by universities, best support informed decision-making effectively in local government contexts? What mix of approaches, tools and trainings are most effective, and in which kinds of contexts and with which kinds of issues? How can we adapt/change our engagement strategies most effectively?

d. By addressing these key questions, will these efforts increase the impact of research-based knowledge generated by land grant institutions?

1. The importance of the work, and what the consequences are if it is not done

A central goal of this project is to carry out research that is essential to improving local government oriented Extension and outreach practice. To do this we need to strengthen the “theoretical underpinnings” of these interactions, to deepen the empirical analysis of strategies employed to implement outreach to local government, and to draw closer and more explicit connections between theory and practice. Based on our pilot research, we seek to explore the use and effectiveness of research-based information and other university resources in the decision-making processes of local officials. This project will advance research to improve land grant universities’ effectiveness in engaging key stakeholder groups via the communication of appropriate data and analyses to enhance local decision-making capacity. But it is not just about “communicating” data and analyses. It is about creating contexts for effective learning, supporting a systemic capacity for knowledge generation, and increasing the strength of the nexus between “knowing” and “deciding”. This project will build a much sturdier research foundation than currently exists on which to support better informed and therefore improved decision-making at the local government level.

Given the current lack of a strong research base on the engagement of university information resources by local policy/decision makers, too many engagement efforts with local leaders are based on localized experiences and ad hoc “learning by doing”. More systematic attention would provide a more valuable method of cumulatively evaluating and improving the positive impact of university-generated knowledge. Our pilot research to date highlights the role and influence of trusted intermediaries, such as Extension educators, in the information chain. Discovering, through systematic hypothesis testing and analyses, how to strengthen the infrastructure that supports local decision-making based on the best available research and evidence-based knowledge is a key goal. Ultimately, these research results will increase the return on investment in research and outreach within the entire land grant system, through more effective use of research in policy debates and decision-making.

The decisions that local governments are making around climate change are an excellent example of a topic we may wish to focus on in this research. There is ever expanding research, information and discourse on this issue. We posit that the dynamics of education and communication around controversial and potentially polarizing issues like climate change are different than for lower profile or less politically polarized issues. A growing body of research shows that standard approaches to information conveyance about highly polarized issues can even have “backfire” effects (e.g, Kahan, 2010). In sum, this project will investigate how faculty, researchers and Extension educators can create processes where research and data about polarizing issues can constructively and openly support informed decision making.

2. The technical feasibility of the research

The pilot-scale, cost effective research approaches we have used thus far have included technically simple (although often logistically complex) methods. For the pilot study, we selected three very different NYS counties (Onondaga, Seneca, and Saratoga) based on characteristics such as population size, degree of urban/rural status, race and ethnic diversity, poverty, economic growth, county legislative structure, and a variety of other indicators. Together with the elected officials and staff, we identified specific fiscally-related decisions requiring a legislative vote (e.g., service sharing, property tax cap override, land use/energy issues, invasive species, casino gambling, investments in water infrastructure, and convention center development). The Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) Executive Director in each of these counties played a pivotal role in helping us engage with the legislators and understand the local context.

Research proceeded through focus groups and follow-up meetings with elected officials in the pilot study counties, as well as a literature review and several conference calls with various advisors and Extension educators from other counties. Results of this research included identification of the following four main “categories of influence” that determine how or why data/information/research may or may not be used in the decision-making process. It is from these categories that we derive hypotheses for our proposed research.

a. Attributes of the decision: Level of complexity, Level of controversy, and the importance of consequences and impacts.
b. Attributes of the decision-making body (group): Legislative structure, norms for decision-making, and political diversity/uniformity.
c. Attributes of individuals involved: Experiences and values, leadership skills, relationships and trust, credibility, etc.
d. …and other political and contextual factors: distribution and sources of power, etc.

As we move forward in refining and implementing a multi-state research project design, we anticipate utilizing enhanced methods, including social network analysis, to deepen our understanding of the processes and contexts. Across our multistate group, our research will focus on change practices; that is, what practices, especially by intermediaries, actually result in changing decision-making outcomes? What combination of research methods can convincingly determine this? And what practices can help support the consideration of research-based knowledge in the cases where issues and decisions are highly controversial and/or polarized? Because of the nature of the funding we are seeking, most of our partners’ work will involve adaptation of their ongoing research agendas to integrate with, complement, and respond to the overarching research question and collaborative framework we have adopted. A recent research award to one of our Cornell partners (on Linguistic Bias in Communicating about Public Controversies: Effects of Communication Media) affords an especially exciting opportunity to deepen a longstanding collaboration. The social networking analysis we are proposing to carry out poses, as a primary challenge to its technical feasibility, the problem of obtaining access to the communication records and habits of, ideally, researchers, intermediaries, and local officials. We believe the challenge to obtaining this data can be overcome by building on the longstanding general relationships of trust we have built with all of these groups over decades. This is also a major reason to take a topically and geographically targeted case study approach that enables more intensive interactions with a comparatively small network. Moreover, there are several approaches we will use to obtain at least some of the data we are interested in. These include interviews, access to public records that are either widely available, voluntarily provided or often routinely accessible through the use of Freedom of Information Laws, and survey techniques.

In the next phase of research we seek to build in evaluation methods with respect to varied interventions currently utilized in local policy-relevant work. Particular attention will be given to CCE’s legacy approaches to policy education which have evolved increasingly towards an embrace of “deliberative processes” in cycling through Public Policy Education (PPE), Public Issues Education (PIE), and Public Issue Dispute Resolution (PIDR). Though these tend to focus on policy education approaches intended to promote learning by “the public”, they also influence the relationships between information sources and local policy makers. Interventions evaluated (i.e., research treatments tested) will include elements such as issue framing, avoidance of culturally polarizing language, collaborative stakeholder and intermediary role analyses, “trust building” and multi-stakeholder partnership building. We have identified Cornell faculty to partner with on this phase and we look forward to pooling our knowledge with colleagues in other states (including some of our current project collaborators and advisors). There are several analytic tools that others have effectively implemented to measure and assess social impact and diffusion of knowledge, but that we did not employ in our pilot work. We have evaluated these methods for appropriateness, feasibility and cost effectiveness. We will now formally incorporate Social Network Analysis (Carrington, Scott & Wasserman, 2005; Wasserman & Faust, 1994). Key variables such as reciprocity, structural balance, clusterability, degrees of trust, and depth of relationships will be operationalized (a process of defining the measurement of a phenomenon that is not directly measurable) and measured to assist in supporting or refuting our a-priori hypotheses. We will approach the exploration and testing of the efficacy of different methods and levels of outreach and engagement through the development of logic models linking different kinds of interventions, diffusion networks, and contexts to different expected measurable outputs and outcomes.

3. The advantages for doing the work as a multistate effort

Our prior research findings support the hypothesis that county board structure and political diversity is important in determining the shape and extent of informed decision-making. In addition, we know that the diversity of structures and contexts in NYS is inadequate for generalization beyond state borders. A strong focus of our work moving forward is to develop processes and protocols that have national scope and implications. To better inform, supplement, and support our work with these goals in mind, we have developed a multistate advisory team. Most of our partners are already working on closely related interests and research questions. Our partnership will facilitate a convergence of disciplines and methods on a common research agenda. Rather than focusing on replication of a single experimental design in multiple states, we believe there is more to be learned in this field by using complementary research designed to address a range of contexts and approaches and drawing on the expertise of multiple institutions. Results from such multi-faceted research can then be aggregated and synthesized into knowledge that will inform a broad array of contexts.

The questions this research addresses are relevant for all Land Grant institutions across the country, and indeed any university engaged in applied research and outreach/extension efforts. Approaching this research and outreach work as a multistate effort will allow us to more fully explore the broader ranges of contexts and issues in and with local policy makers’ work. With a more complex range of contexts and issues incorporated into the research, our results can more adequately address this complexity. Our multistate collaborators are listed in the next section. In addition to these individuals and the institutions they represent, this project will benefit from other state-level and national connections with organizations such as the National Association of County Organizations, the National Council of County Association Executives, National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals, and Local Government Extension Training Network. Further we would explore potential relationships with several Communities of Practice via eXtension.

4. What the likely impacts will be from successfully completing the work

A significant impact from the successful completion of this project will be development of training modules specifically targeted to Extension educators and faculty who are or strive to become local decision makers’ “trusted intermediaries.” Such individuals are important links in the information chain that Land Grant (and other) institutions need to engage with in offering evidence-based knowledge and data to inform local decisions. Our CCE partners have discussed how this role of intermediary specifically pertains to them. Knowing how to “insert” themselves into the local issue (being proactive); how to be viewed as a trusted peer and an expert and impartial; learning how to foster a dialogue around important and contentious issues (providing a safe venue); maintaining close relationships and frequent contact with elected officials; and providing data and information, but with an understanding of relationships and local context, is a set of complicated yet ultimately critical roles to master. Our proposed research will provide evidence-based data guiding people as they move into these roles. In addition, an important outcome of this work will be to increase the return on investment in research-based knowledge by supporting its relevance, accessibility, use, and impact for local decision-makers.