Making a Difference: Provincial Policy Reflections on Knowledge Mobilization

Governments across Canada struggle to develop and implement robust, flexible, and effective rural policies and programs to meet the ever-changing contexts of rural communities. Critical to understanding how policymakers are addressing this challenge as they design, implement and/or evaluate rural policy and programming is examining if and how they use research evidence – and what kind of evidence – they use to inform this process. Through interviews with policy makers across Canada, this project investigates knowledge mobilization processes and relationships between academic research and the public policy process for rural policy decision makers. This research will directly contribute to improving rural development public policy in Ontario by providing critical information about current challenges to and opportunities for more effective knowledge mobilization in designing, implementing, and evaluating successful rural development policies and programs.