Against a backdrop of renewed interest in place‑based policy, academic-policy engagement is playing an increasing role at local level to support realignment between universities and public policy – aiming to bring academic knowledge and policymaking into closer orbit.
For example, at Insights North East, a collaborative hub for place‑based policy insights, based at Newcastle University, we have been working with regional policymakers on a range of public policy challenges from public sector reform to tackle childhood poverty to the role of enterprise to drive inclusive growth.
Yet connecting across places is rarely a matter of simple alignment. Rather than fixed anchor points, policy engagement more closely resembles navigating a constellation of stars, where new actors, relationships and forms of evidence come into view over time. Indeed, the upcoming May local elections will likely add further complexity as new parties and representatives enter the fray. Increasingly, we need to focus less on how universities can pull policymakers into their orbit, and more on how we can work across the wider system to enable different ways of making policy.
Crucially, misalignment is not only between universities and public policy. Across the system, public policy development has become increasingly unpredictable, fragmented and oriented towards short‑term interventions that skim the surface of deeply entrenched challenges such as health inequality or low productivity. Properly addressing these issues requires more than assembling evidence about what works on an initiative-by-initiative basis. It demands the ability to think and act across multiple dimensions of time, scale and system.
“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”
Faced with this complexity, a common starting point is the suggestion that “we need some mapping” – a means of navigating quickly to the right expert once a policy problem is identified. Yet fixed information rapidly becomes out of date. In practice, most policy challenges require curating a mosaic of expertise and evidence that cuts across disciplines and draws on lived and practitioner experience to be relevant and usable.
As the CAPE report on knowledge mobilisation makes clear, effective engagement depends on acting as a “weaver of many threads” convening people, evidence and experience across systems while remaining responsive to shifting political and policy contexts. This is less about directing traffic along established routes and more about sensing where connections can be made and remade over time.
From the demand side, Areas of Research Interest (ARIs) have sought to surface and refine policymakers’ priority research questions. Yet both angles reveal the same tension: meaningful engagement rarely conforms to tidy systems or repeatable pathways. Instead, it often requires highly bespoke combinations of expertise, relationship‑building and judgement, demanding significant skill, capacity and institutional support.
Quick, quick, slow
Slow response times are often framed as a barrier to academic-policy engagement, given the time required for rigorous research. One way of unlocking this challenge is by drawing on the wealth of (often untapped) existing research, supported by skilled teams capable of translation and synthesis.
Crucially, this rests on an in‑depth understanding of policy partners, built through sustained relationships, conversations and ongoing intelligence. We have found that the ability to deliver rapid responses is critical for building trust and fostering meaningful connections. But if this is all universities offer, they risk selling short their potential contribution to public policy. Responsiveness matters, but it is not the end of the story.
Policy engagement is rarely linear. Requests for rapid input are often followed by periods of silence as agendas stall, shift or are overtaken by events. My colleague, Professor Louise Kempton, refers to this as the policy engagement foxtrot – a rhythm of quick, quick, slow – often on repeat. Navigating this requires patience and judgement; knowing when to push an agenda forward and when to pause, listen and allow longer‑term insights to develop.
The future isn’t built overnight
Across public policy, it remains far easier to finance new initiatives than to sustain existing ones. The consequence is a system that struggles to move beyond start‑up phases, limiting the ability to compound the value of iterative learning alongside deep, trusted relationships built over time.
These dynamics expose a deeper issue, our difficulty in recognising, valuing and sustaining impact over longer horizons. The argument that research impact takes time has been well rehearsed since introduction of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It has resurfaced with the emergence of the UKRI thematic buckets. Yet this understanding is often confined to blue‑skies research. It needs to extend to public policy engagement, particularly where ambitions are long‑term and structural. Policy interventions are rarely in place long enough to understand their full effects. Later evaluations of Sure Start illustrate this clearly.
Why cross‑system coalitions matter
Across the UK, governments at all levels face persistent challenges in translating policy ambition into sustained improvements in people’s lives. While evidence on what works continues to grow, delivery systems often lack the coordination, capacity and stability required for lasting change. Fragmented governance, short political cycles and limited collaboration constrain transformative action, particularly in complex, place‑based contexts. As Sam Freedman highlights, systems designed around short‑term incentives will defeat even the best intentions: “a bad system will beat a good person every time.”
One way forward is to broaden the space and bring in a wider breadth of actors and organisations, many of whom are working on the ground, day in, day out, with enduring commitments to their places. Sustained change requires cross‑system coalitions capable of withstanding political churn, funding cycles and shifting priorities. This is central to effective place‑based policy, and, ultimately, to influencing a Westminster agenda more attuned to realities on the ground.
Universities have an important role to play here, drawing on the freedom of academics to think beyond short‑term delivery and engage with the deeper structural drivers shaping outcomes within places. A delicate approach is required, acting as a partner rather than a leader. As the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Dame Angela McLean, noted in her keynote at UPEN’s annual conference, being a critical friend is an important role, though not always a comfortable one.
Working across space, as well as time, means recognising that no single institution can deliver transformational change alone. But by acting as convenors, connectors and weavers of many threads, universities can help create the conditions for sustained policy impact. In a public policy system defined by flux, this capacity to hold relationships and coalitions together may be one of their most valuable contributions.
