ABSTRACT
This chapter shares insights about funders and their priorities for researcher-policymaker partnerships. It discusses funders' perspectives on these working relationships. Funders make researcher-policymaker partnerships a priority because of the multiple anticipated benefits. For some federal grants, collaborating with academics is a requirement of grant receipt yielding partnerships generally believed to produce better science, practice, products and public policies than efforts that lack partnership. Federal and private institutions in the United States and globally invest billions of dollars every year to support innovations in the hard sciences. During the George W. Bush administration, as part of the President's Management Agenda, the White House and its Office of Management and Budget (OMB) championed the use of research evidence and rigorous evaluation in order to improve results achieved in federally funded programs nationwide. By mid-2006, eight federal agencies with the most robust evaluation capacity had submitted approximately science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education program evaluations for review.
