Knowledge exchange at the Berlin University Alliance's “Crossing Boundaries” event.
Such findings have a direct benefit for politicians, but also for us as citizens. How do you share your knowledge?
Klüver: At SCRIPTS, we make a variety of efforts to make our scientific findings available to the public as well as to decision-makers. For example, we run the Knowledge Exchange Lab, where we also hold events for the general public. These are also attended by people from politics and journalists, with whom we then enter into a direct exchange about our findings. We also prepare our studies for social media and regularly post articles on our current research.
How do you communicate with politicians?
Klüver: We also make our findings directly accessible to politicians. As part of the Citizens' Councils project, for example, there was a workshop in the Bundestag where we presented our findings to decision-makers. We also presented the findings of a study on vaccination readiness during the coronavirus pandemic directly at a Bundestag hearing and were thus able to provide evidence-based information to the legislative process.
After all, we are in frequent contact with political parties and foundations. We hope that through this exchange we can contribute to strengthening our democracy.
Börzel: We are working closely with the Federal Foreign Office, currently on the Gaza conflict: together we have asked ourselves what the prospects are for a two-state solution after the end of the war and how it could be realized. We first discussed what knowledge we could provide for the Federal Foreign Office. We then consulted our own research, processed the knowledge and discussed questions. Such an exchange is based on trust, which we have been able to build up over many years of cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office.