publication

Knowledge brokers in education and international cooperation a typology with blurred boundaries

Authors:
Gita Steiner-Khamsi
2025

This chapter draws on the two-communities framework (science and politics) and situates knowledge brokers as intermediaries between the two communities. After presenting a few push factors (how to better communicate research) and pull factors (how to improve uptake), the author focuses on an underexplored area of research: institutionalized forms of knowledge brokerage and, more specifically, international organizations as intermediaries. She recommends that we differentiate between different purposes of knowledge brokerage in terms of the policy cycle and finds that there has been a move from using evidence for agenda-setting to promoting the use of evidence for implementation. Finally, she makes a case for the study of institutional strategies in order to understand how organizations make their policy advice heard in an era of “Governance by Numbers 2.0,” that is, in an era in which the world of international cooperation is filled with intermediaries that use evidence-based policy advice as a tool of global governance.