Keynote 1 – From Research to Action: Improving the Policy Impact of Academic Research

Abstract
Most academic research around issues such as child labour, forced labour, and human trafficking aims to have an impact on the design or implementation of public policy. More often than not, academic research ends up confined to the academic market, with public policymakers turning to academic research only to provide cursory support to prior beliefs. In this talk, I will argue that modest changes in how we design and discuss academic research can bridge the academic and policy markets and that the existing divide between academic and policy-directed research is unnecessary and inefficient.