Rafael Vilasanjuan: Policy and Global Development

Rafa Vilasanjuan, Policy and Global Development Director, introduces this area and the work it conducts to achieve translation, a key concept in ISGlobal. As he explains, translation involves, on the one hand, communicating research results and knowledge to society and to decision-makers in order to improve behaviours and regulations. And, on the other hand, it means taking this knowledge to the field and sharing it with other organisations with the goal of scaling it up.

Video Transcription:

Translation: well, that’s a concept which is not only for ISGlobal. As a research centre, we develop knowledge. But what we want out of translation is to bring this knowledge into action, into reaching the people, into being sure that it is impacting the society.

We mainly focus on three areas. The first one is Communication. We want to go to general public. This is very important for social behavioural change and that affects a lot everything that we do regarding environment and health. Most of the habits that we have need to be changed and that is why we want to have bigger audiences, to reach the global public.

We also have Policy, which means that, once we have the knowledge, we want to translate it into action for decision-makers. So we want to be sure that people doing regulations change or adapt the regulations to the new knowledge, or even create new policies based on the evidence that we have already developed.

And the final step would be Development, which means that we go sometimes to the field to show that this is possible, to show that there are results, and then we create programmes. We are not a development or humanitarian organisation but we do pilot projects, we take the evidence and we show that it is possible to change things so that other people in other organisations may take the idea and scale it up.

That is the concept of translation at ISGlobal.