Aber- implementation science

As critical as the science is, the bigger challenges are implementation and policy challenges. So, I’m a card-carrying union member. I’m a developmental scientist. I deeply believe in the positive role science can play in revealing what children’s development is all about, what’s most influential, and in guiding us to good intervention strategies. But identifying an intervention that works is light years different from figuring out how to scale those interventions with sufficient quality to have population-based impact. And so, I think, this forum has shed a very bright light that in almost every country in the world, the gap between science and reality for an entire population of kids on the ground is a very big gap. 

The second insight, though, is that we don’t have to despair that- in the face of that gap. There are many things we are learning how to do. So through implementation science, we’re learning how to deliver programs more efficaciously, with higher fidelity at lower cost. And if we don’t learn how to do these with equal power for lower cost, the economics of the situation will not allow us to have population-based impact. We’re also learning that some policies can really enable that kind of activity, and some policies actually discourage or throw up severe barriers to that kind of policy. And we’re learning that advocacy with policy makers can help us strengthen some of the enabling factors and reduce some of the barriers. But it is pick and axe work, it’s, you know- there’s nothing fancy or glorious about it. You go in and you develop relationships and you hope that reason and sense will out over time.