Differential access to urban environment and health advantages was empirically analysed in Accra, Ghana and Sao Paulo, Brazil from 1991 through 1994. Analysis revealed sharply polarised responses on the part of policymaking elites to new environmental health knowledge, depending largely on their ideological stance on inequality and towards research that challenges received wisdom.

The study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the Global Environmental Change programme. Its context was the differential impact of rapid poverty-driven urbanisation combined with processes of macroeconomic polarisation. How (the research enquired) did these factors affect urban environmental and socio-economic conditions across income groups within cities in developing countries?

Figures from UNCHS and others show that on average 29 to 45 percent of urban people live amid extreme deprivation, whilst an affluent minority holds a major share of environmental and socio-economic privilege.

The relationship between technical information and policy is often romanticised. Many construe this link as neat, static and apolitical. Often the interface between research and policy is thought to be simply a question of effective dissemination of accurate facts to inform technical policy content. Researchers often present policy recommendations as if washing their hands of the complex narrative process in which knowledge and power interact. Yet meanings attached to research findings vary in relation to the audience and its perspectives. In the words of one Ghanaian researcher: 'It's like poetry: you don't expect everyone to hear the same meaning, do you?'

Respondents included politicians, technical staff, civil servants, academics, media and non-governmental groups in Sao Paulo and Accra, and a comparable cross section within the international donor community. Between 1993 and 1995 the research team held workshops, reported to the media, published articles and attended conferences. This more orthodox dissemination process was enhanced by interviews, literature review and participant observation, involving policymaker elites, media, teachers and local government functionaries, with a view to cultivating a sense of 'ownership' of the study among this diverse array of interests from the outset. Findings revealed two main modes of knowledge transfer across the research-policy interface (see box, below).

Repeatedly, respondents cited a sense of ownership of research ideas as a critical factor in their adoption of research results. This response became a signpost to the study's key finding, that environmental learning is a process of negotiation between 'new' knowledge and 'internal' or 'old' knowledge that is polarised in line with attitudes of policy elites towards inequality and towards ideas that challenge orthodox wisdom. Among policy implications arising from the study were signs that: