Dancing in the Dark: The Relationship between Policy Research and Policy Making in Dutch Higher Education

The idea that research is directly useful in the policy process has been widely disputed,2 and much has been written about the differences between the contexts or “cultures” in which research is produced and in which policy is made.3 A number of authors, however, have pointed out indirect ways in which policy makers may make use of research findings or have tried to find more complex ways of understanding and describing the relationships between researchers and policy makers.4 It has been proposed, for example, that the categories of researcher and policy maker are not always mutually exclusive and that interactions between all actors involved in this process could be better described as two-way, rather than only as one-way, interactions.5