This chapter highlights how the evolving field of implementation research is being used to address problems of implementation of health policies, programs, practices, and technologies in low and middle-income countries (L&MICs). Implementation research offers a way to understand and address implementation challenges and contribute to building stronger health systems within the realities of specific and changing contexts. It is used to assess how and why interventions work, including the feasibility, adoption, and acceptance of interventions and their coverage, quality, equity, efficiency, scale, and sustainability. A well-designed research question is critical to successful implementation research, and provides the basis for choosing the research methods and how likely the research will influence policy and practice. In describing the theories, frameworks and tools used in implementation research, they are shown to be well suited to address inter-dependent and complex problems around improving people’s wellbeing – a critical mandate for achieving Universal Health Coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Viewed from the perspective of problem or decision theory, the process of government is a form of multi-dimensional optimisation. Conservation science has a role to play in guiding this optimisation in relevant fields. Working with/in government requires capacity to flex to the various stresses operating at any time. Scientific activity requires more than a support function in government because it needs to lead development of long-term strategy. Conservation research often emphasises highly specialised studies of particular species or habitats in particular circumstances with little power to generalise. More could be done to lead, and question, the basis of the current policy balance between protecting species and habitats and protecting functional ecosystems and measuring ecosystem dynamics. Conservation science is also challenged by difficulties associated with issues of replication and appropriate statistical power. This generates high uncertainty and a tendency to overinterpret results, as well as a complex interaction with the political discourse requiring careful management of the extent to which this influences research outcomes.

This chapter describes how the world’s first independent air force, led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, reacted to the threats to its existence by maximizing the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) operational utility and financial efficiency, while simultaneously contriving a credible narrative about its future strategic potential. In pursuing these twin narratives, the RAF developed a unique culture of beliefs and taken-for-granted attitudes that thrived because of the conceptually incurious nature of the men it selected to become officers. Few of these technically able "practical men" were willing to challenge their superiors’ intuitive and speculative belief that the morale of civilian populations was especially vulnerable to bombing. Instead, like their leaders, they became consciously complicit in acceding to the societal prophecies, articulated in books, films, and newspapers, that bombing would have apocalyptic effects, and that civil societies subjected to its effects would wish to sue for peace. The chapter concludes by analyzing how this culture impeded the realization that the anticipated outcomes were not being achieved and explains how this stymied options to pursue alternative strategies.