CORPUS: Linking Research and Policy for Evidence-based Policy-making on Sustainable Consumption

Sustainable consumption has become an increasingly important topic on the European political agenda. At the same time, for many years now European researchers have been exploring ways towards greener consumption and produced sound evidence with potential to serve as a basis for policy-making on sustainable consumption. Yet this huge body of research has, up until now, been underutilized. The purpose of the CORPUS project has been to explore innovative modalities for enhancing the connectivity between policy-making and research in the area of sustainable consumption. In this chapter we describe our experience with a knowledge brokerage system comprised of two intertwined building blocks, a series of “policy meets research” workshops which attracted almost 300 professionals from all over Europe, and a web platform named “SCP Knowledge Hub” which evolved into a major knowledge repository for almost 900 registered users. We identify three design principles for effective knowledge brokerage and overcoming of the translation barriers between science and policy - i.e. participatory, activating and modular - and formulate practical recommendations for brokering knowledge through an online medium.