Understanding the impact of knowledge brokering organizations: the case of the UK What Works Centres

An increasingly common response to the challenge of facilitating engagement between research and policy is to establish knowledge brokering organizations (KBOs). These perform important evidence mobilization functions, but the precise nature and extent of their impacts on policy and practice remains underexplored. This is partly because it is difficult to attribute specific impacts to intermediary actors within the wider networks in which they operate. There is therefore a pressing need to improve understanding of the impacts of KBOs and how they can be assessed. This paper addresses this through a qualitative study of the ways in which a network of What Works Centres (WWCs) are engaging with these challenges in the UK. Our research questions are (1) How do WWCs aim to contribute to policy and/or practice across different contexts? (2) How do they relate these potential contributions to the ways in which they define, track, and demonstrate their impact? We contribute to the literature on KBOs by showing that WWCs seek to influence policy and practice not just by facilitating access to evidence, but also by developing close relationships with decision-makers and building capacity to act upon knowledge within professional and place-based systems. The findings also highlight that the WWCs are in the process of developing approaches to plan for and evaluate these impacts that reflect their complex and uncertain nature. The paper concludes by discussing the possible use of evaluation frameworks that focus on demonstrating the contributions KBOs make to the processes through which impact occurs.