Foreign policy making with the academe

As career foreign policy practioners, we were asked by a group of academics/political scientists led by North Carolina State University to evaluate a series of papers they had prepared on energy security and the energy and security nexus. The organizers noted that an important stimulus for our invitation was that the academic community was hearing that their work needed to be more policy relevant, that it needed to be more “applicable” to help policy makers make better decisions. So they asked us to join their workshop to help determine how their papers and the arguments within them might better elaborate the value of and means to effect cooperation on energy based on the connection between energy and security. And if so, how to stimulate a sustained dialogue between and among scholars and policy-makers because of the prospect of making better informed policy.