This report concludes the first stage of the integrated project KNOWandPOL (“The role of knowledge in the construction and regulation of health and education policy in Europe: convergences and specificities among nations and sectors”). This project is organized around three complementary orientations. This report deals with Orientation 1, which seeks to give a first and general analysis of the social and cognitive mapping of the sectors under study. Orientation 2 analyses decision-making processes as such, paying special attention to the way information and understanding are deployed and learning takes place at different stages. Orientation 3 is focused on the growing use of regulatory instruments that entail the production and dissemination of information, studying their fabrication and their use by the decision-makers for whom they are intended. This report draws on the research data and analysis presented in 12 country reports. This report attempts to move beyond summary and into an integrative synthesis of the main ideas that have emerged from reading across these reports, in such a way as to provide a forward movement or ‘orientation’ towards the remaining work of the project. The analytical synthesis is offered through the organization of text using the key elements or features of the knowledge and policy landscape that were developed in the process of working on Orientation 1. Thus the transversal analysis of the reports is grouped under the following main headings: Context, Structure, Actors, Knowledge, and in relation to an emergent and tentative hypothesis, about which we say more below.