Different places need different civic universities

Universities have long played an active and beneficial role in promoting regional development, with their civic institutes helping connect academic expertise to local policy and delivery.

However, this dynamic does not play out the same way in every place. As local conditions vary significantly, so too do the institutions that are within them. A university in a devolved mayoral combined authority with an established growth strategy has almost nothing in common, in civic terms, with a university serving a sparsely populated rural region with no equivalent tier of local government to partner with.

I have worked with both, and yet the sector still talks about “civic engagement” as though it were one activity that scales up or down depending on ambition and budget. In The Civic 6 framework, which I published through the Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Hub at the University of Birmingham, I wanted to make a quieter but more useful point. The six models we identify are not really six points on a single scale of civic seriousness; they are six different answers to six different kinds of place and their capacity and capability needs.

Ranging from “civic-embedded regional development institutes” to “networked regional policy collaboratives” and “translational policy communication platforms” among others, our examples included City-REDI here in Birmingham, Y-PERN across Yorkshire, and Policy@Manchester in the North West.

What struck me most while writing up the case studies is that each model emerged as a fairly direct response to the governance texture of its place, rather than from an abstract theory of what a civic university should look like.

City-REDI’s embeddedness reflects a metro mayor and a well-developed regional economic strategy, while a networked collaboration like Y-PERN reflects a region without a single dominant governance body, where coordinating across several mayors, local authorities, and partner universities is the whole point.

Place as a design constraint, not a backdrop

Testing each model against ten critical success factors for places, drawn from earlier 2024 work by Taylor and colleagues, shows how important local conditions are.

A “good” civic institute will not look the same everywhere. Local governance capacity, the presence or absence of a strategic authority, and the density of existing civic infrastructure should be treated as design constraints, not background context.

A model that succeeds in a place with strong institutional thickness – by which we mean dense civic, public and organisational relationships, and infrastructure – may simply fail in a place without it. This is not because the university did anything wrong but because the model assumed conditions that were not there.

Our review of the four LPIP pilot partnerships gives the clearest evidence of this. They span rural Wales, a complex authority mix in England, the whole of Northern Ireland, and a fourth Scottish partnership formed around the natural water landscape.

These pilots were explicitly designed to test how the same underlying ambition, connecting local policy problems to national ones, plays out across genuinely different governance environments. They include places with devolved administrations, strategic authorities, and places with neither. Judged against a single template, some of these partnerships would look like weaker versions of a metropolitan model. Judged against the conditions of their own place they look like sensible adaptations.

Rural and devolved places test the framework hardest

The most interesting pressure point in the report is what happens to these models outside the UK’s larger city regions.

A civic-embedded regional development institute assumes a regional economic strategy and governance partner sophisticated enough to embed into. Those assumptions simply do not work for rural or more sparsely populated areas, where the relevant tier of government may be thinner, more fragmented, or still forming.

Our attention to equality, diversity, and inclusion in civic engagement is relevant here too, since rural and coastal communities are often the ones least represented in national policy conversations precisely because they lack the institutional density that makes the more embedded civic models viable.

I do not see this as a flaw in the framework so much as an honest acknowledgement of its limits. The right model depends on local governance capacity. If a place lacks the institutions or infrastructure a model needs, forcing that model onto it is unlikely to work.

A university operating in a devolution deal desert has different, not lesser, options: networked collaboratives, translational communication platforms, or single policy issue institutes may all suit a governance-thin environment better than an embedded model borrowed uncritically from a mayoral city region.

Beyond the report

For a higher education sector under pressure to demonstrate civic and economic value in almost every region, I think the wider implication here is that comparing institutes to each other on a single scale of ambition or funding is close to meaningless without accounting for the place each one operates in.

A modestly resourced networked collaborative doing well in a fragmented rural governance landscape may represent a more genuine civic achievement than a well-funded embedded institute operating inside an already sophisticated, combined authority.

If funders and universities take one thing from this report, I would want it to be that measuring civic university impact fairly means measuring it against the governance conditions of the place, not against a single national template of what a good civic institute looks like.

I would like this to become a live piece of sector evidence, not just a one-off report. If you work in or with a civic institute in a rural, coastal, or devolved part of the United Kingdom, particularly anywhere without a mayoral combined authority or equivalent strategic tier, I want to hear how the framework does or does not describe your reality. Contact the LPIP Hub directly and consider getting involved in our next round of pilot partnerships.

The best test of this framework is not whether it survives peer review, but whether people working in genuinely different places recognise their own institution in it.