The POLNET (Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison) study started out as a Norwegian study that explored how policy knowledge was produced and used, respectively, in Norwegian school reform (Karseth, Sivesind, Steiner-Khamsi, 2022). In the political system of Norway (as well as in Sweden), the Norwegian Official Commissions have an advisory role vis-à-vis the line ministries. Given POLNET’s focus on evidence-based policy decisions, we compared the “evidence” referenced in Green Papers, which were produced by these advisory bodies, with the evidence referenced in the White Papers, issued the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. Similar to Norway, the Swedish political system also has policy advisory bodies in place that review past school reforms and make recommendations to their respective line ministry. As a corollary, we were able to apply identical sampling strategies to the Swedish POLNET study: we compared the production, as well as the use of evidence, between Green and White Papers.
The other three political systems in the POLNET study (Denmark, Finland, Iceland), however, have different “expert-seeking arrangements” (Baek, 2020) or evidence-production/utilization mechanisms in place. Unsurprisingly, the incommensurability issue was at center stage at each stage of the five-country study, ranging from the initial stage of data collection (selecting the functionally equivalent entity of the Norwegian and Swedish Official Commissions) to the final stage of interpreting the findings of the country case studies. Different from the research question that accompanied the POLNET study from the onset—whose knowledge is used as an authoritative source to establish evidence and subsequently to justify evidence-based policy decisions—this investigation digs into the question of where policy evidence is produced and used, respectively, in vastly different political systems. To complicate the narrative, it is indispensable to take into account multi-centric governance (Cairney, 2020) or network governance (Ball and Junemann, 2012), respectively, and acknowledge that ultimately the political fabric of evidence production/utilization matters.
Investigating functional equivalence is only a starting point. What is equally important, from a system’s perspective, is how the various entities within an expertise-seeking arrangement (advisory committees, hearings, stakeholder reviews, commissioned reviews, etc.) relate to each and how they, taken together, differentiate and distance themselves from non-expert arrangements. As a result, the comparison of different political systems always becomes a matter of translation: identifying what the structures, mechanisms, and entities for evidence production/utilization mean in a given political context.
