Using local knowledge in policy making

Abstract

This chapter presents the landscape of technical and non-technical factors shaping constraints as well as opportunities for the use of knowledge in policy-making. It describes the challenges and strategies to communicate local knowledge for influencing policy-making processes in the formal-legalistic policy-making process. The strategies include understanding the political economy of policy making process, working politically through relationship-based approach and crafting local knowledge as an ‘electoral asset’ of shared concern in a decentralised political system, made possible by local knowledge serving to constitute social identities as base of political support.