@waldemaringdahl
Research & policy communication. Working at the intersection of research, public policy and governance. Focus on judgement, trade-offs and institutional context rather than advocacy or commentary. Occasional links and reflections.
Intressant poäng. Det pekar på ett institutionellt skifte: rollen som kunskapsintegratör försvinner inte när regler förändras, den flyttar. I det här fallet från konsultsektor till myndigheter och forskningsinstitut.
Därför mäts ofta synlighet i stället för genomslag.
Policybrief → publicera → sprida → mäta räckvidd.
Det som saknas är kunskapsintegration:
att översätta evidens till policyalternativ, analysera konsekvenser och föra strukturerad dialog med beslutsfattare.
Triangelmodell för kunskapsintegration mellan forskare, administratörer och kommunikatörer i forskningskommunikation.
Akademin fungerar ofta genom en rolltriangel:
• Forskaren – producerar kunskap
• Administratören – hanterar resurser
• Kommunikatören – sprider resultaten
Alla tre behövs.
Men ingen har ansvar för policyintegration.
Forskningskommunikation räcker inte för policygenomslag.
Problemet är sällan brist på policybriefs, webbinarier eller nyhetsbrev.
Problemet är organisatoriskt:
Många forskningsmiljöer saknar en funktion som ansvarar för att forskning faktiskt integreras i beslutsprocesser.
EU policy discussion in Brussels on misinformation and the information environment with speaker at podium in front of EU flag.
Brief thought after a discussion at the EU Commission’s office in Stockholm on improving the “information environment”.
The debate on misinformation still seems dominated by regulation and media literacy.
Are there research strands exploring preventive resilience in the information environment?
If we treat preparedness as an optimisation problem, we may build more efficient institutions.
But without confronting the political conflicts, we risk reproducing the same future trust crisis.
What happens when experts disagree?
Who carries responsibility when knowledge is provisional?
How much centralisation can democratic systems absorb?
But COVID was not only a stress test of systems.
It was a stress test of legitimacy under uncertainty.
Pandemic preparedness is often framed as a technical issue: better coordination, scalable diagnostics, clearer advisory structures.
On World Futures Day, it’s worth asking how governance systems value the future.
Foregone benefits rarely enter the calculus.
A short reflection on uncertainty, innovation and the proactionary principle.
waldemaringdahl.medium.com/the-proactio...
We’ve normalized aging = productivity decline. But if aging biology is even partly tractable, the economics shift: a 1-year gain in healthy lifespan is labor and fiscal strategy. The question is how much is modifiable and whether institutions adapt.
www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/06/o...
When optimisation becomes the reference point, deviation starts to look like error.
Over time, convergence can feel like quality.
Without deliberate variation and institutional friction, standardisation becomes invisible.
And the exceptional becomes harder to recognise.
We keep asking whether AI can have taste.
That may be the wrong question.
The deeper shift begins when human taste is gradually calibrated in dialogue with models trained on statistical averages.
Models don’t just generate content.
They shape expectations of what “good” looks like.
The central problem may not be opacity.
It may be a misplaced responsibility.
When governance becomes infrastructural, accountability must still attach somewhere.
Longer analysis: waldemaringdahl.medium.com/algorithmic-...
Public authority ties responsibility to office and mandate.
Algorithmic systems distribute action across politics, administration, vendors and professionals.
Diffusion is structural.
Accountability weakens when no layer clearly owns the outcome.
Transparency and explainability matter.
But when decision-support systems shape outcomes, responsibility cannot remain abstract.
Accountability must be institutionally anchored.
Where does that anchor sit?
Quite so. Procedural legitimacy always depends on background trust. What’s changing is where the strain becomes visible.
As institutional trust thins, procedures no longer carry legitimacy silently. The relational layer turns explicit and politically contested.
That’s where fragility enters.
Legitimacy used to be procedural.
It is becoming relational.
When authority depends on networks of trust, rather than mandate, governance becomes more fragile under pressure.
Radioessä från 2012 om Robert Reich, utbildning och arbetsmarknadens framtid.
Då: ingen reaktion.
Nu: vardag.
🎧 www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/5094...
Detta bygger på en intervju med professor Karin Bäckstrand, som lett ett forskningsprojekt om global hållbar styrning vid @futures-studies.bsky.social
Resultaten visar varför många partnerskap för Agenda 2030 underpresterar.
www.iffs.se/nyheter/glob...
Agenda 2030 tenderar allt oftare att behandla symtom.
Utan koppling till ekonomisk omställning riskerar partnerskapen att missa de strukturella orsakerna.
Sammanträdesal i FN:s ekonomiska och sociala råd (ECOSOC), använd för globala styrnings- och samverkansprocesser inom hållbar utveckling och Agenda 2030. Foto: Photo by Mr. Kjetil Ree – eget arbete, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Partnerskap kan se inkluderande ut på papperet.
I praktiken urholkas legitimiteten när lokala aktörer och civilsamhället är närvarande men perifera.
Många offentlig-privata partnerskap misslyckas inte för att aktörerna är oense om målen,
utan för att ingen har mandat att fatta beslut när målkonflikter uppstår.
NATO headquarters meeting room in Brussels with allied representatives seated around a circular table, symbolizing post–Cold War European security architecture, institutional stability, and the long-standing assumption that NATO guarantees security without constant political debate. By Haim Zach / Government Press Office of Israel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128276159
For a long time, ‘NATO exists’ functioned as a stabilising assumption in European security.
It reduced uncertainty and reduced the pressure for deeper debate.
The question now is whether the same assumption still fits a changed security environment.
Yes. Especially the point about lost civic reasoning feels urgent where legitimacy, not optimisation, is the binding constraint.
Forskning bidrar till samhällsutveckling först när den faktiskt används i beslutsfattande.
Vi har tagit fram en praktisk handbok i forskningskommunikation, baserad på arbete vid Institutet för framtidsstudier.
Länk i kommentarerna.
Yes. The lab is the easy part.
Normalization is where governance quietly begins.
We always discuss “AI as a social actor” culturally first.
Jokes, vibes, fascination.
Institutions arrive later.
The truly difficult part begins when it no longer feels strange at all.
The problem with news isn’t that they’re data points. The problem is that they often lack time horizons, comparisons, and institutional context.
