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Public scholarship and the evidence movement: Understanding and learning from Belgian drug policy development

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-12-03, 16:29 authored by Julie Tieberghien, Mark MonaghanMark Monaghan
Debates about public scholarship have gathered momentum in several fields including sociology and criminology. There is much debate over the nature of public scholarship and the forms it can take. In criminology one of the most influential analyses of public scholarship has been developed by Loader and Sparks. For these two thinkers part of the task of scholarship is to contribute to better ‘politics’. In their hands, public criminology is close to another long-running analytical trend; research utilisation. The two literatures have for the most part remained separate. This paper puts Loader and Sparks’ framework of public scholarship to the empirical test to see if and how it contributes to understanding the role and nature of evidence use in highly sensitive policy areas. We do this through an analysis of recent changes in Belgian drugs policy. We conclude that the framework of Loader and Sparks, although useful in illuminating how publicly engaged scholars can influence and mobilise more open and better informed public and political debate, is hamstrung, by its concentration on the action of individuals in isolation from the complex power structures that underpin the policy process. Synthesising lessons drawn from the research utilisation literature with the work of public criminology provides a potential way forward in understand the role of evidence in policy and also producing ‘better’ politics in this context.

History

Published in

European Journal of Criminology

Volume

15

Issue

3

Pages

278 - 295

Citation

TIEBERGHIEN, J. and MONAGHAN, M.P. , 2017. Public scholarship and the evidence movement: understanding and learning from Belgian drug policy development. European Journal of Criminology, 15 (3), pp.278-295.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by SAGE

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-04-30

Publication date

2017-10-10

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal European Journal of Criminology and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370817731413

ISSN

1477-3708

eISSN

1741-2609

Language

  • en