Matthew Flinders and Jessica Benson-Egglenton This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Understanding the dynamics of research–policy fellowships: an evaluative analysis of barriers and blockages’. Supporting embedded academics requires understanding role types, managing ‘bandwidth,’ and setting clear expectations. In recent years the dominant notion of ‘research excellence’ has expanded to include a joint emphasis on both knowledge creation and knowledge utilisation. Research funding is now targeted as addressing specific societal challenges. Forms of co-production and co-design have been promoted as a way of bringing potential research-users into project design and delivery. Thus, a vast and complex landscape of boundary-spanning initiatives and investments has been established to facilitate the use of research by policy-makers. The challenge, however, is that policy-making is a messy and sometimes irrational process. Brian Hogwood and Lewis Gunn famously exposed this simple fact in their book Policy Analysis for the Realworld (1985), and recent work from the Institute for Government underlines the continuing validity of ‘the real-world messiness’ argument. Policy-makers often criticise academics for having neat, linear theories …