Des barèmes génériques pour évaluer les impacts de la recherche sur la société : l'exemple des impacts politiques

Agricultural research must contribute to addressing the diversity of challenges faced by agriculture today and in the future, which includes assessing its societal impact. The ASIRPA approach (Socio-economic analysis of public agricultural research impacts) was developed at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) to this aim. Based on a series of standardized case studies, the method offers an understanding of impact-generating mechanisms and reports on the societal impacts of research. This paper presents the method developed by ASIRPA to build rating scales. These rating scales are one of the tools developed in the whole ASIRPA approach. They are applied to a growing number of cases to build a robust picture of the impact of a research organization. The design of these scales relied on i) building an analytical framework, ii) applying the framework to pilot cases, and iii) further discussing it with a panel of experts. The resulting metric is a 1 to 5 grading scale measuring the intensity of impact, with generic criteria associated to each level of the scale. We found that the metric could be used for the self-assessment of case studies. We illustrate the approach with the work carried out to develop the metric for political impact. We conclude by highlighting possible uses of the metric we developed and drawing attention to some limitations of this approach as well as to areas for future research.