Creating resilient and sustainable critical infrastructure using evidence informed policy

Contemporary policy development is reliant on evidence and knowledge. An important contribution to evidence are systematic literature reviews that synthesise knowledge into a coherent body of work. However, in the discipline of Policy Studies, the rigour of systematic literature reviews has been questioned. 

The first 12-months of this project has addressed this challenge by developing a new and innovate methodology for research protocol development in systematic literature reviews. This rigorous and transparent methodology will provide policy makers with the confidence they require to use the knowledge from systematic literature reviews and integrate this into the development of their evidence informed policies.

In the next 2-years this project will conduct three interrelated systematic literature reviews investigating governance settings, resilience and sustainability, and policy problems in the water, energy, and transport sectors. The findings will be synthesised to provide an overview of synergies across and between these three sectors. This is important as it will highlight the independencies between and across each infrastructure, as well as increase society’s understanding of the complex relationships that exists between and across critical infrastructures.