In How to Engage Policy Makers with Your Research: The Art of Informing and Impacting Policy, editors Syahirah Abdul Rahman, Lauren Tuckerman, Tim Vorley and Phil Wallace compile advice from a varied range of contributors on how academics can achieve research impact by connecting with policy makers. This practical resource takes stock of a growing impetus to facilitate pathways from academic research to tangible policy impact, writes Huw Morris.
How to Engage Policy Makers with Your Research: The Art of Informing and Impacting Policy. Syahirah Abdul Rahman, Lauren Tuckerman, Tim Vorley and Phil Wallace (eds.). Edward Elgar Publishing. 2022.
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Having spent much of my career working at the interface between academic research and government policy, I was eager to read and review How to Engage Policy Makers with Your Research: The Art of Informing and Impacting Policy and surprised at a seeming lack of engagement with the book by academic journals and reviews. This surprise was informed by my awareness that increasing researchers’ engagement with public policy making has been a growing focus in government-sponsored research assessment, funding, direction and encouragement over the last ten years. To promote this activity, the Research Excellence Framework panels in 2014 and 2021 looked at impact case studies and from 2013, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has provided an annual prize for the best example of impact on public policy. In addition, UK Research and Innovation has recommended that applicants for funding detail how their research will achieve impact with policy makers and other organisations. To add further impetus to this push, in 2017 UK Government departments published their Areas of Research Interest detailing the research they were keen to commission. More recently, UK research councils have begun to award funded policy fellowships to encourage researchers undertaking policy-focused research.
It is against this background of increasing government interest in, and funding of, policy-focused research that the editors have brought together a team of 41 researchers, policy makers and funders to produce a guidebook of recommendations on how to engage policy makers with research. The four editors, Syahirah Abdul Rahman, Lauren Tuckerman, Tim Vorley and Phil Wallace, are well placed to provide this overview based on their work at the Innovation Caucus hosted by Oxford Brookes University and funded by the ESRC and Innovate UK. Their wide-ranging experience and wealth of contacts has enabled them to assemble 24 complementary chapters which between them describe many of the ways in which research can have a greater impact on policy.
The book is divided into three sections which focus on (i) understanding the needs of policy makers and articulating the offer from researchers, (ii) modes of engagement, and (iii) examples of informing, influencing and impacting policy. In the first of these sections, Graeme Reid and Sarah Chaytor provide excellent practical guidance on who researchers should approach within Government departments and Parliament when seeking to influence policy and how best to deal with different groups of these representatives and the civil service departments that support them. In the same section, Anand Menon and Jill Rutter emphasise the importance of building teams of researchers and relationships with potential users of research rather than relying on broadcasting through print and online media, while Sarah Foxen and Rowena Bermingham underline the importance of developing a shared language, rather than researchers and policymakers writing past each other. These observations on the barriers to effective communication between stakeholders suggest why some researchers are reluctant to become involved in this work and some journal editors to address this agenda. As Menon and Rutter recognise, for academics “promotion, particularly [in] top ranked departments, depends almost exclusively on publication records rather than ‘impact’-related activities” (59), incentivising them to prioritise placing research articles in academic journals over fostering greater research impact.
The section on modes of engagement covers a variety of methods, from the development of a ‘critical friend’ function to targeted policy engagement events, and from collaborative doctoral research to research networks and commissioned research. The academic world described consists of a variety of new and hybrid academic roles, from applied PhD studentships and doctoral placements for trainee researchers, to policy fellowships and embedded research roles for mid-career researchers. These researchers and the policy specialists they work with are supported by a new group, knowledge brokers or mobilisers who work to connect researchers with policy makers and practitioners. While recognising new ways of enabling collaboration between researchers and policy makers, the authors in this section acknowledge that it remains a difficult task. Debbie Johnson and her colleagues observe that, “[n]o matter how robust and thought provoking the insights provided, sometimes the academic finding is simply not palatable to the policy maker” (109). Similarly, as Sarah Weakley comments, “[i]t is challenging, if not impossible, to trace a ‘policy impact’ back to a single policy event or discussion series. This is because policy is often made, revised, and implemented incrementally based on small decisions, using evidence, expertise, emotions and beliefs” (121).
The final section of the book describes policy engagement activities in a wide variety of contexts, from the institutional to the local and regional and from the national to the international, while also commenting on the contribution of this activity to sustainability initiatives and early career researcher development. The analysis of how researchers can and do engage with policy makers includes traditional views of policy making as a linear process or cycle to more relational and systems-based views. This section also engages effectively with more critical accounts of who the researchers and policy makers are as well as their varying research and evidence interests and objectives.
From lone new researchers to members of large teams and institutes, the picture that emerges from the book is one of a thriving area of academic enquiry with many examples of real-world policy engagement and impact. The book achieves its aims of illustrating in a very practical manner how academics can more effectively engage with policy makers through a variety of different types of activity. The editors and authors also succeed in demonstrating the value of university-based research for policy makers as undertaken by academics at different stages in their careers.
If I have any quibbles with what is an impressive book, it is the absence of the voices of politicians who commission and sign off this research and of the stakeholders and end users who are the participants in data collection and analysis. The first group, elected representatives, are ultimately accountable to the media and voters for publicly funded research and the second group are the subjects of what becomes policy. The book is 288 pages in length, so perhaps these perspectives, as well of those of current policy makers, publishers, media editors and think tanks, might form the focus of a subsequent volume.
Overall, How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research is a valuable resource for academic researchers and policy makers, and the activities and debates that it documents deserve greater coverage in academic journals and mainstream media.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
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