Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of research at the individual and organisational levels of decision making within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia's bilateral donor agency, set against the constant oscillations between the political and technocratic rationales for its aid program.

Paper long abstract:

The Developmental Leadership Program (DLP) is a DFAT-funded international research program that focuses on the role of leadership, power, and politics in development. In its third phase, it comprised seven research projects across the Asia-Pacific region. This paper presents findings from a three-and-a-half-year period of embedded doctoral research with DLP. It explores the political economy of Australia’s international development ecosystem, and the constant oscillations between the political and technocratic rationales to establish the legitimacy of foreign aid, providing the backdrop for the analysis of how research, evidence, and expertise are sought and used by a major bilateral donor agency. The embedded research involved long-term, multi-sited, multi-modal, and sustained observation of DLP's engagement with DFAT and with project teams over a period of considerable upheaval during COVID-19. This was complemented with data from over 50 interviews with officials, diplomats, locally engaged staff, managing contractors, consultants, academics, researchers, and development professionals, on their experiences of research uptake with DFAT and DFAT-funded programs. Individual motivations, intrinsic biases, and perceptions and interpretations of research are explored, and how they influence bureaucratic strategies for using research to inform policy and programming. Along with the tensions in navigating managerial incentive structures while upholding disciplinary leanings, professional interests, and personal causes, this paper identifies where research is used in DFAT’s design, implementation, and evaluation processes, and the influence of foreign policy priorities and DFAT’s institutional dynamics and organisational culture on research use. Recommendations to strengthen DFAT’s capabilities to engage effectively with research and evidence are also discussed.