CLOSING THE KNOW-DO GAP
Reviewed by Jayanti Roy

The Knowledge Translation Toolkit
Ed Gavin Bennett and Nasreen Jessani. Sage. Pages 253. Rs 495

Library shelves are creaking with the weight of tomes of research work. Research theses, publications and reports gather dust as nobody turns the pages and valuable findings gradually become useless data. This is both a sad and unfortunate situation that the knowledge gained after spending money, time and energy in research is seldom applied, hardly used to guide any policy and rarely getting translated into action. The implication of this gap is immense as it means that precious findings remain buried in papery graves while people suffer due to the want of application of this knowledge. Areas like health and education where a sound evidence based policy has the potential to bring about real changes can benefit hugely from bridging of the know-do gap.

Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) have been working together on Governance, Equity and Health (GEH) programme which supports research to address health inequities in Low and Middle Income Countries. This book is an outcome of the team's work with researchers on one hand and decision makers on the other. The objective was to offer a toolkit for knowledge translation which would help enhance the researchers' capacity to translate their sincere work into positive action and allowing the evidence on the paper to be gainfully used by the community.

The book proclaims that with hundreds thousands of scientific papers published every year it would be foolish for the researcher to think that the research that one has so painstakingly done will somehow automatically reach the right policy maker who will eagerly lap it up to immediately implement in the field. In fact, publishing a research paper is not the end of the job for the researcher, only the beginning of the arduous path of making the research heard, understood and used. For this a researcher should have adequate skills of translating his or her knowledge into doable actions.

This book has been developed as a toolkit for knowledge translation and though dealing with serious, technical issues has a crisp presentation of contents. The toolkit includes five sections and fifteen chapters. The sections deal with the concept, the audience, the message, medium and tools in that sequence. The book charts its path from explaining the contours of knowledge management to evaluative thinking, context mapping and communication strategy. It also explores print, social and popular media and multimedia as methods of effective communication. A complete chapter on how to write policy brief, using technology and monitoring and evaluation makes it ready-to-use and application oriented. There is freshness in explanation of the concepts and illustrations given by the authors. For example in the chapter on communication strategy which otherwise is a clichéd topic with hundreds of writings on it, the authors have been able to circumvent the much treaded path and present the content in a novel way. Though it never goes for long winding preaching, there is a subtle motivational tone in the book, which encourages the researcher to feel enthusiastic in working towards bridging the know-do gap. Copious notes, references, resources and information about websites are a treasure for researchers interested in further investigation. Detailed figures, flowcharts, bulleted information in boxes provide instant understanding of complex and abstract concepts in a reader-friendly manner.

Written basically for the arena of public health most of the examples, stories and case studies in the book are from that field only but it does not hinder the reader from getting the essence of the concept being explained rather it enhances the understanding. A must for all research scholars, especially at the academic university level so that the idea can be drilled into them that ivory tower ideas are no good until they make the world a better place.

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