About this episode
Broadcast on
8 May 2023
The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy is the cherry on top of an intricate and diverse ecosystem that provides for the science and evidence needs of policymakers in the Netherlands. It has a unique mandate: to look beyond the daily cut and thrust of politics, to challenge both government and parliament to think about important strategic issues that stretch into the future. Oh, and it reports directly to the prime minister.
Sounds too good to be true? Here is its secretary, Frans Brom, to explain why it works, even so.
The transcript below was generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies.
Toby Wardman
Hello, this is Tobi. If you are a long-time listener, you will know that if you hear my voice before the music starts, it's usually me apologising for something. And today is no exception. I want to apologise for the audio quality in part of the interview you're about to hear. It's my fault. When we made the recording, I didn't spot that the sound is in some places a bit muffled or boxy, as I've learned it's called in the trade. I've done my best to tidy it up, but with only partial success in some places. I don't know if it It makes it better or worse to add that the conversation is nonetheless a very interesting one, because I guess if it wasn't interesting, nobody would care if the audio quality was off anyway. I hope you bear with it, and I hope you get as much out of this conversation as I did, which was a lot. On with the show.
Frans Brom
Hello.
Toby Wardman
Welcome to the Science for Policy podcast. My name is Toby, and today I'm joined by Professor Frans Brom. Professor Brom's background is in bioethics and the ethics of technology, on which topics he has advised the Dutch government, as well as researching and lecturing in several major universities. He's now Director of the Office of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, or WRR, which provides science-based strategic policy advice to the Dutch government and the Dutch Parliament. So Frans, welcome to the podcast.
Frans Brom
Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
Toby Wardman
I guess the abbreviation WRR makes more sense in Dutch than English.
Frans Brom
Yes, it does. In Dutch, it's Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, which is translated as Scientific Council for Government Policy.
Toby Wardman
You run the office. Does that mean you run the organisation or what's your role there?
Frans Brom
My role is, well, the council is composed about eight professors appointed by the government for a period of five years. They have a chair and they have a secretary, and I'm the secretary of the council. In that sense, I let the council run smoothly. In order to support the council, there is a research staff and other staff. I'm head of the bureau that supports the council, which is to researchers and Secretary Communication people and others.
Toby Wardman
Okay, thank you. Well, now, I said this in just a few words, but perhaps you can say a few more words about the role of the Council, what it's for.
Frans Brom
The council We advise the Dutch government on long-term strategic issues that are for more than one Ministry relevant. We advise on issues that are relevant for the next period of government, but we don't advise only future oriented, but we advise how these long-term issues are already on the agenda now. I'll give an example. We wrote a report on the sustainability of our healthcare system. In the long run, the ageing population with higher prices for medicine et cetera, all developments in science and technology in the medical field. In the long run, we have to think about how we keep our healthcare system financially sustainable. And by writing that report, we saw it's not only financially sustainability, that's a big issue. There are two other sustainability that are as important. That is the personnel sustainability, giving demographics, giving the development of our society. Less and less people are there to to work in care and in cure. So that's really a sustainability question popping up already now, but when we wrote reports two years ago, it was on the agenda. And there is societal sustainability. How do we develop a system that's not only financially or with regard to personnel is sustainable, but which has a firm basis in our societal solidarity.
Then we said, looking at the long term perspectives of healthcare system, you don't need to look only at financial sustainability sustainability, but you need to take the other sustainability's abort and think from a more integral perspective on the long run.
Toby Wardman
Okay, so the way you described it, it sounds like it's quite a specific mandate that the council has. You mentioned strategic stuff, you mentioned longer term stuff, and also this thing about being across multiple ministries. Yes. So this makes me think this is not the only game in town for Dutch science advice.
Frans Brom
Of course not. We have a very elaborate landscape of science advice in the Netherlands. We have planning bureaus, we have councils advising on specific issues like a Health Council or like a Council of International Affairs, and of course, we have universities and research institutes advising government. But our Our goal is very specific to look at the long term issues and the strategic issues. We advise to look beyond the politics of today, to look beyond the politics of next week to the politics of the long term. We advise on issues that are otherwise not on the agenda.
Toby Wardman
The first thing I always want to know when I learn about a new or an unfamiliar science advice model is on whose initiative do you act? Are you asked to investigate things by the government, by the policymakers, or do you set your own agenda?
Frans Brom
The core is the council decides its own agenda. But sometimes government asks, advise on issues, and we take those into account or not. Mostly, we take them into account. When an issue pops up, it's already discussed before there's a formal question. In that sense, we can say, Well, this might not really be relevant for us. You better bring it to a specific council. Or, Yes, we would like to do it, but it will take a year before we start it because currently our projects are fulfilling all our time. That's the way we look at it, to elaborate a system of making our own agenda. We start only two trajectories a year, maybe three. These trajectories take a long time, take a few years, in which we do a lot of things. We have already a lot of interaction with government, with parliament, with experts on the topic. Then we have somewhere near the end. Because before the end, we write the report. Then from that report, we also have a period in which we explain and bring the report to our audience. It It's if we take a theme, it takes a few years, including the report, including the interaction, including the research.
We have only a few themes a year, so we really have to be careful on which things we put on our agenda.
Toby Wardman
That's really interesting. You're describing a system which is quite slow, which is self-initiated, so you set your own agenda, you don't have your priorities dictated to you by your client, and which deliberately takes a view that goes beyond the short term priorities of politics, of any individual government, any individual political mandate. Exactly.
Frans Brom
That's a very good summary of what we're doing.
Toby Wardman
Right. So this sounds extremely worthwhile and important, but it also sounds like something that is a very It's very difficult to... Well, let me put this in the form of a quest.
Frans Brom
To get across. It's very difficult to get across. Yes.
Toby Wardman
Difficult to communicate, but also who on Earth is interested? Or rather, how do you make policymakers interested? Is there really such a mature It's a small political debate in the Netherlands that a government has the room to stop and listen and think about these kinds of issues and can see the importance of doing that even in the middle of the cut and thrust of daily politics?
Frans Brom
Yes, but we take a lot of time in getting our message across. So it's not just writing a report, putting in an envelope, sending it, and ready. No, we really take a lot of time for interaction, for conversations. For instance, my chair visits all ministers at least once in two years. So all ministers have a conversation with the chair of our council, and in this conversation, she already explains what we're doing, brings forward the issues, asks whether they have questions that you could put on our cross-list of topics and have a real conversation. Second, we have twice a year a meeting with our Prime Minister in which we tell him what is the the things that are working, are going around, which are the issues that are on our agenda and how we deal with them and why they are for long-term relevance for him and his work.
Toby Wardman
We have-So that's a very high-level opportunity you have. Is that interaction established in law, or is that something that you managed to engineer each time a lot?
Frans Brom
The council is technically part of the Prime Minister's office. The staff are employees of Prime Minister's office, although the staff has only responsibility for the content towards the council. So Binance, et cetera, are part of Prime Minister's office, but the content is independent set by the council. So there is already a working relation between between council and Prime Minister's office, also with civil servants supporting Prime Minister, where we have meetings, where we discuss issues in a way that brings them forward our idea. This goes back, I would say, 12 years when we had external evaluation which said, You need to take more time in interacting with policymakers. I think rightly so did the evaluation say that at that time. Your independence is not at risk when you pick up the phone to talk with the city servants. I think that's really an important issue. We have really contact. The same we do with parliament, not only the coalition that currently our country, but also with opposition. It's important to work on that sense that current opposition might be tomorrow's coalition. You really want to have links with a broad political spectrum in to bring forward our reports.
Next to that, we have meetings with the city servants working on the issues that are relevant for the project. If we do a project on the future of labour, and we really have to discussions with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Ministry of Economic Affairs, the people working on issues with regarding to labour market and the organisation of labour. But we also had explicit meetings with unions, with employers, and with a lot of different scientists, economists, sociologists working in that field. We really try to get the knowledge from the system into our report.
Toby Wardman
Yeah, that must That's very essential. I think you mentioned you have eight professors. Did you say 22 staff researchers?
Frans Brom
Yes, 22 staff researchers.
Toby Wardman
So this isn't enough to have expertise on every area under the sun?
Frans Brom
Not at all, not at all, no. To be honest, sometimes it's even good not to have specific expertise in a certain discussion, but get the experts around the table and see to be able to transcend their specific expertise and link it on another level to our advice. We really need We need to understand the expertise, but we need not to be already socialised in certain scientific debates, therefore not able to see above this debate or place them in a strategic perspective.
Toby Wardman
Yeah, that's interesting. Do you do original research ever or do you see what you do as original research, or is it only ever knowledge gathering in synthesis?
Frans Brom
Well, it's a bit in between. We sometimes do a little bit original research. For instance, we did a report on capacity to act and how people act and how it's not just knowledge, but all knowledge from psychology, how people make decisions and virtues, whether you behave, whether noncognitive experts are really important in making decisions. And then we did some research to understand how it's developed and how it's done in society. But in general, we take research from experts. But we do, of course, conceptual research, philosophical research in getting to understand the issues that are that they will be looked at different forms of social research, economic research, in order to understand what's going on. It's not primarily data gathering, but it's a lot of analysis we do.
Toby Wardman
It seems like there's actually, when you scratch the surface, there's actually a lot of areas of expertise that have to come together to make this model work. There's not just the science and the science synthesis, and then, as you said, the data gathering and packaging and so on. There's also the horizon scanning and figuring out what to do. There's the expertise in understanding the political context, how to position your advice to make it land, and with whom, and in what way, and when. It's a lot.
Frans Brom
Yes. For instance, when we write a report, we do quite some research, one could say, contemporary historical research, and the policy history of a certain topic, understand how the policy had developed, what the role of the different actresses. If you look at the health system policy in the Netherlands for the past 30 years, last 40 years, you see that certain things have been tried over and over and over again and didn't function. So it doesn't help to advise the same thing, even if it might be from an abstract, systematic perspective, be a good advice. You really need to understand why certain advices in the past worked or didn't work in order to understand what could be a helpful advice. And at the same time, you don't want to be stuck to what is on the table now, because then you can't do something new. So often, our advisors are taking the problem, turning it a few times around and say, maybe if you frame it in another way, new avenues of coping with it open up.
Toby Wardman
I was going to ask the question I want to ask. I'm not sure how to phrase it. How free floating then are your topics and questions, really, when you generate them. I mean, so of course you do horizon scanning. I mean, in one way of looking at it, that's really what you do, isn't it? You're horizon scanning writ large. Go on, sorry.
Frans Brom
Yes, but the risk of saying we're doing horizon scanning is that you're looking at the future and forget the relevance for the here and now. Most important is that our reports end with a perspective on what's needed now, what has to be done on this long term issue Now, so the future starts now. That's one of the words we tend to say when we do our reports.
Toby Wardman
Okay, yeah. So you wouldn't look into an issue that you thought might be high on the agenda in 20 years time if you didn't think there was something to do about it now.
Frans Brom
Exactly. If it's on the agenda in 20 years time, then the least is to be done. There are infrastructural things that needs to be done now, or there's legislation that has to be prepared now. If it's social disruptive, you have to think about how to to structure our current society in order to be coping with this technology. We did a big report on artificial intelligence, and the core question is, this is the technology that will change society broadly. It's more like a booster engine Then it's like a small thing. It's really system technology that really changes our future structure. It's not something one ministry can take into account, say it's innovation, but it has to be thought through from of government. And that's difficult because no one is really prepared or has skills to do such a broad change of such a report. It will take a few years in order to land. People start with using the bits and pieces they can use now. And in the long run, it might, if you're successful and if you keep on pushing it, it might really help to change the way government looks at such a technology.
Toby Wardman
How long have you been around? How long has the Council existed?
Frans Brom
The Council exists over 50 years. Last year, we had our 50th anniversary, so that's quite some time. So it has its background in some ideas about planning that nowadays we know that are not necessarily very helpful, very scientific or rigorous plannings ideas. We make a scientific Council, and then that helps to make our policies.
Toby Wardman
Okay, hang on. What do you mean by that? Because that's intriguing. Because I was going to say that is a very enlightened politician 50 years ago who thought, You know what we really need is some long-term strategic advice.
Frans Brom
Absolutely. It was at the time from the Club of Rome, sustainability discussions 50 years ago. Really long-term issues were on the agenda. But the basic idea was a little bit more positivistic about science than we nowadays know how it functions. It was more science-based than science-informed, one could say, the idea, and it was more the idea that the science... A little bit technocratic flavour. That was one of the critiques when the Council was started 50 years ago. Isn't this too technocratic? We really worked in those 50 years systematically that we are there to support policymaking, and we are there to do the policymaking instead of the policymakers. I think that's one of the important things. We really try to put on the long-term issues on the agenda for the policymakers and provide options, sometimes direct directions, because as a council, we're not just informing. We might say this or that seems a good direction. Of course, being an advisor, put your advice next to them, and that's a good thing because policymakers have another responsibility than we have ourselves. It's really important to advise and not to to take this place off. And an interesting thing of the Dutch situation is that if we write a formal report, government has the obligation, the legal obligation, to write an answer to our report to parliament.
You say, Aha, they can. Of course, you can write, It's a very interesting report, and it supports our current policy, and then it becomes a really bit very precise, time is not right to do so and so. That would be a very problematic a response from our perspective. We really want to write reports in which they engage with our reports, and that succeeds sometime better than another time, of course.
Toby Wardman
Exactly. Yeah. But it requires that somebody has to read it, take it seriously, read it from start to finish, write down a response. In a way, the response is neither here nor there. I guess it could provide some ammunition for political opponents or whatever. But the point of the report is that it mandates the reading.
Frans Brom
Yes. Because we write reports that go over the borders of one ministry, there really has to be interdepartmental discussions on our reports. I think that's the first and very report on the way it works and it gets the input, impact in the policy making of the Ministry. Then, of course, when we write a report, we present it to those who might be relevant in executing policies in the field. So we present it to parliament, we present it to legislative bodies, we present it to newspapers, to NGOs,. So it's public, it's in a public domain, and if we are invited to explain it, of course, within the limits of our practicalities, but we explain what is written. And we make short movies about the report in order to get better access to the content. And we make summaries, we make one-pages, we make infographics. There's really this, sometimes, few hundred pages report, which is the content backbone, but no one will read it, or at least very few people read it. You need to make it accessible. But I think we need this backbone in order to, if people doubt a certain idea of what to really engage in discussion, that they see how, why, and on what basis we argue for such a point of perspective.
Toby Wardman
Yeah, of course. The depth is there for anyone who wants to dive in later. Yes.
Frans Brom
For myself, it's important to have the depth. If in advance, you know what you're writing, we wouldn't be additional to what is already done. So we really want a few places where on kick can take the time to wander around the problem and see whether there are avenues that have not been taken and try to find new problem definitions. That implies erring a few times.
Toby Wardman
You mentioned the dreaded word impact.
Frans Brom
Yes.
Toby Wardman
I was cautious about bringing it up because I know it's always such a difficult thing to to figure out. I imagine, especially in this context, with this advice.
Frans Brom
Yes and no. There is impact. You can measure some impact. But on the same hand, if you are doing a good report, you change some way of thinking and others are going to build upon your report. It's difficult to say when there's a policy change, whether it's exactly ours or not. But that's not the most important point. The most important point is that when we propose a change of view, when we propose an idea that something is really relevant, that in society and in policy-making circles, it gets seen, and it gets read, and it gets used, and that takes quite some time. The first point is we want the report. We want Our ideas to be seen. That's the first point, was a necessary step before something can be done, and that's something you can measure. Is it quoted in parliament? How many downloads? All those practical things that many of us use in looking at that impact. That isn't necessary, but not sufficient step in getting impact. You need to measure it in order to see whether your report is seen. If it's not seen, it can't have impact. But once it is seen, something more has to be done.
It has to change the way people think rather than the way they frame a certain issue. And that takes just time. Continuing discussion, explaining the report, explaining the message, looking for a moment in which you can bring it forward again, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one of the issues where we're struggling with or where we now have our discussions internally. How long do you go on with explaining a certain report or when do you start with a new topic? Because otherwise, you would never do a new topic. But that's also not very good.
Toby Wardman
Yeah, indeed. As time goes by, you only accumulate more past reports. Exactly. The weight of your past work just goes up, it never comes down.
Frans Brom
Yeah. On the other hand, some things on the past are really old. That's also We work on similar issues in a few times. We wrote in the past 50 years three reports on Europe. The last report really looks quite different than the first report. I think it helps really to frame the issues, but we take up issues from the earlier reports.
Toby Wardman
Yes, fair. Everything you've said about impact, I think, was very nicely put, and I agree. I think it's something I've heard from others, too, that the impact you can measure easily is not the kind that in the end matters. I mean, you could look at society and say, Society has changed in this particular way, which perhaps we anticipated or we hoped or we recommended But you can't say that changes because they read paragraph 19 on page 60 of your report.
Frans Brom
Exactly.
Toby Wardman
Yeah. I'm jealous that you're in a sufficiently established position institutionally that you can afford to be be sanguine about that. You can say, We know that we can't demonstrate this, but we were never going to be able to, and that's okay.
Frans Brom
Well, we get an external evaluation every five years, and the evaluation committee interviews a lot of stakeholders around us, asking whether we have impact. So there is really an impact measuring by interview stakeholders. So we just have an evaluation behind. We just received reports. We are working on... Well, it's quite positive. And they interviewed quite a lot of people on our reports. Well, they say, that's an interesting thing, that having an impact is not only depending on what you're doing yourself, but also whether there is a possibility to absorb on the other side. That's where they have some critical remarks towards the political atmosphere currently in the Netherlands as well, that a little bit more room for understanding long-term issues would be good for policy-making and politics.
Toby Wardman
Indeed. Yeah, of course, to an extent that also bounces back on you, because you have to work in a political environment that you've got. Exactly. And so recognising that means you might be able to work in different ways. Understood. Do you get lobbied? Is your stuff contested? Does it enter into the public debate in that way?
Frans Brom
Yes. We wrote a series of publications on migration. One of the core messages we had was that migration is not old-fashioned in the way that a few countries send a lot of migrants, but that migration Netherlands is from all over the world and all different countries, but all different kinds of ways why people come to the Netherlands, from expats to refugees, from skilled technicians, whatever, to students. So there's a really big broadness of refugees. And that, for instance, our statistical way in looking at migration was not fitting current developments. So we said, you have to really have a more precise way of looking where people come from. We argued against the use of the word Western, non-western, absolute non-scientific tools to look at migrants from that perspective. We said the Dutch word alloghetoon, which is a word for those who are not born in the Netherlands, is not really very helpful in understanding what's going on. Use migrants and be more precise in where migrants come from. That's the word things that we said. Of course, some people thought that was not necessarily what's... Especially people who are a little bit more xenophobic than we are, that this is not the way of looking at it.
So we, from discussions on that issue, we get a report on the future of labour, where we said the better grip on the work of people in the labour market is really important. And some people say, Well, the flexibility of the labour market is one of the things that makes the Netherlands very economically successful. So be careful, not take away the flexibility so that then you get a discussion on that report. We did a report on where does our money come from on the structure of who makes our money, especially a digital money and the role of banks in that field. It was quite some discussion on the role of banks, of course, with regard to that report.
Toby Wardman
I can well imagine. I mean, those are all massive political hot potatoes. Yeah, as you mentioned, all three of them.
Frans Brom
If it's not a hot potato, it's not interesting for us.
Toby Wardman
Well, I'm very pleased to hear you say that. That's a case I've been making with my colleagues for years. I come from a background of political communications, and we used to say I mean, mostly to reassure ourselves, as you can imagine, if someone isn't upset that we've done something wrong. But it's one thing to say you do your work and you lob the hot potato into the public sphere and then the debate ensues. That's one thing. But I'm interested more in how the heat of the potato impacts on your work when you are handling it, as it were, before you throw it.
Frans Brom
We are not interested in just getting a hot debate. That's not our task. Our task is whether we can look at the hot potato, maybe cut it in pieces in order to let it cool down a bit and say, Well, this piece is much more interesting than that piece. And on this piece, we need to do policy. And that piece is creating a lot of societal noise But if you really look at it, it's not the most important part of the potato. So we really want to make clear. We try to cool down hot potatoes in a way that policy can get the grip on. And we do that by Technical, scientific, social, historical, contextual analysis.
Toby Wardman
Yes. I suppose also not everybody in society wants that to happen. For some people, the potato should really stay hot. That's a value to them.
Frans Brom
Yes, exactly. It's valuable for them from their perspective, yes.
Toby Wardman
There's one other area I want to ask you about, and that's this idea that you advise both the government and parliament. Maybe I should say, first of all, for the benefit of listeners who come from countries where things are organised differently. We have a lot of listeners in the US, for example. This is not quite as dramatic a distinction as you might imagine. So in a parliamentary system like the Netherlands, the government emerges from the Parliament and is pretty closely linked to it. There's no completely separate legislature or an executive, like in France, for instance, or the US. So I guess to advise both is not automatically some deep conflict of interest. But still, it's interesting because I guess you do mean something when you say that you advise both government and parliament. Do you, for instance, advise individual members of parliament? Or what? How does it work?
Frans Brom
No, That implies that our name is for government policy and not for government. That was a deliberate discussion 50 years ago, because if it was for government, we would be the one supporting government. But by doing for government policy, a government policy is legally made by parliament and government. From that perspective, we have this link. That's the first. Second, we get ideas what topics we would do also from parliament government, to be more clear, in the last few years, several times in Parliament, people have asked government, have asked ministers in debate, Would that not be an issue to ask the WRR to write a report on? That's, of course, vulnerable. We are very glad that they ask. It's too often to say yes, because we think that some issues that are not asked for might be needed, that we take time to do them. So you can't do we have to think with the aspect? We try to do sometimes something different and write a full report on it, organise a meeting, or use our power to convene people to have a debate on something, bring politicians, scientists, policy makers, to get around the table and discuss an issue, that's what we sometimes do.
Sometimes we bring it into the traject that we we have. For instance, issues with regard to the climate justice. We were working on it and there were specific questions about whether financial institutions should take responsibility for climate consequences of their investments. We wrote a broader report on climate justice, on distributed justice in climate policy. Then we took a little bit of those issues into account. That's the second way we work for parliament. Third is that all our reports, we give a technical briefing to parliament if they want to. We go to parliamentary groups to explain if they invite us, not individual members. Well, if a parliamentary leader ask us to tell a bit about the report, of course, we will do because that is a group. But it's not that we advise on strategic policy perspectives of individual parliamentarians.
Toby Wardman
Okay. You don't, I suppose, get... Well, Do you get involved in commenting on the legislation that's being prepared or debated right now?
Frans Brom
No, we don't. Closest we come to that is that what we did on this report on the non-cognitive powers of decision-making, that we said, you really have to look on how you look at citizens if you make legislation. What do you expect them to be able to do so? What decision do you expect? And is it reasonable to ask this from people under the circumstances they live in. That's amounted into a checklist that has to be filled in when legislation is made, whether there's an image of the doability of the law for citizens is taken into account. So that's close. But then the follow-up of this doability that's in the parliamentary and the legal system and not for us.
Toby Wardman
Is any of your work targeted or useful more widely outside of the Netherlands? Bearing in mind you have an international audience listening to the podcast.
Frans Brom
Two things that might be important for the international audience is that our full reports are translated into English. So we translate all our full reports into English and we publish them in open access so that everybody can get a look at them as relevant. And the second thing is that for us, international Cooperation is important in two ways. One is that the issues our countries face might be similar, although the political circumstances are different, but at least the questions are similar. And we might be able to learn from what other institutions do with regard to the same problems. So that's an important one. And there, of course, is difficulty because there are a few countries that have a strategic Advisory Council that is for science-based strategic advice. But the topics we work on are often tackled in other countries by different institutions. So we try to find in every project, international international links. So that's the first one. And the second is, of course, the science base is international. So we sometimes invite scientists in other countries. And from this perspective, we have one organisation that looks a little bit familiar to us, and that's France strategy.
Paris is a strategic advisory for the Prime Minister and President. Well, we visit them once, twice a year. They visit us, we exchange ideas. I think that's on the international level, a relevant point.
Toby Wardman
Very good. We're coming to the end now. I have just a couple more questions. Firstly, if you were put in touch with someone from a country that is right now in the process of setting up its own science advice mechanism or infrastructure or whatever in some way. What would you recommend them to think about? Do you think the WRR is an example worth replicating? Are there any parts of it that they might find useful?
Frans Brom
I would absolutely recommend that next to all the necessary science-based understanding of the world in order to be able to make policies, you need to have a strategic function. Yes, you need to understand how it impacts of COVID. Yes, you need to understand the safety aspects of a genetic modified organism. All these important issue are really relevant. But if you set up a strategic function next to that, it helps you to have a mechanism that puts issues on the agenda that you otherwise might not see or for which you otherwise would not have been prepared to take into account. Having a strategic think tank that is close enough to policy-making to be able to write stuff that's be understood in the policymaking circles, that is free enough to write the things that are necessary for the long term, and is bold enough to have interaction during the process. That's what we try. I'm not saying that we succeed But that's where we aim at, being close enough to be relevant, being bold enough to be in conversation, being free enough to say things that otherwise would not have been said.
Toby Wardman
It's a very nice, very narrowly defined little triangle.
Frans Brom
Yeah.
Toby Wardman
It's slightly cheeky of me to ask, but I will ask anyway because I can. Is there anything about your organisation, or perhaps in the legacy of the last 50 years, that you would warn someone away from, that you perhaps regret or recognise it's turned out to be the best way to do things?
Frans Brom
I think that what is, has been the struggle and is the struggle is finding the good mix between close enough to be heard and far enough to say things. Of course, we have made not always the right decision in the past 50 years, but I think you need to really to work on those goes to that closeness and distance thing.
Toby Wardman
Yes, makes sense. Absolutely. Last question, what are you working on right now or immediately next?
Frans Brom
We just published a report on justice, distributive justice in the climate debate. We're going to publish somewhere around the summer a report on social position of enterprises, not on social responsible behaviour of enterprises, but in what way enterprises participate in creating public goods, common goods. Then we will have a report somewhere in fall, I think, on societal discontent, and especially how societal discontent links with the grip individuals tend to feel, the control they tend to feel around their life. The idea is that individual lack of control translates its societal discontent. That's a different way of looking at discontent as a societal phenomenon. But these are issues. It's not the only way to look at it, but an additional way that might help.
Toby Wardman
You weren't kidding when you said you're bold in tackling the big questions. It seems like you have lots of them on your plate. Therefore, I'm grateful you were able to take time away from it all to come and talk to me. Thank you for the very inspiring conversation, Professor Frans Bro.
Frans Brom
Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.
Toby Wardman
The Science for Policy podcast is created by SAPEA. It's produced by me, Tobi Wardman, with additional research and support from Agnieszka Pietruczuk. SAPEA is a consortium of Europe's Academy Networks representing more than 100 academies, young academies, and learning societies from more than 40 countries across Europe. We're part of the European Commission's Scientific Advice Mechanism, and as such, we're funded by the European Union. Having said that, the opinions you hear on this podcast are those of the guests, and sometimes mine, but certainly not the views of the European Commission. This music is composed by Carlo Alfredo Piatti and performed by Elizaveta Sushchenko, and this last bit is particularly good.