With better coordination we can break down barriers to academic policy engagement

How can universities best support the UK’s research base to deliver better outcomes for people? This is becoming an ever more urgent challenge for our sector, in the context of a changing geopolitical landscape and the desire of the UK government for research and innovation to better serve the public good.

One route to deriving greater public benefit from academic research lies in research better connecting with and informing public policy development. Recent years have seen a growing number of universities establishing policy units – at least 46, at the last count, and almost certainly more now. There has also been increased investment in policy-focused activity from research funders, for example, Research England’s Policy Support Fund, UKRI policy fellowships, and ESRC investments to increase policymaker engagement with research. New mechanisms to strengthen evidence use, such as government areas of research interest and parliamentary thematic research leads, have been introduced, alongside an increased focus on building capacity for evidence use across sub-national government.

Through the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw the myriad ways in which research evidence informed policy to deliver benefits for people, whether understanding and treating the disease, informing the public health response, or mitigating the wider social impacts.

You can’t always get what you want

“Academic-policy engagement” is becoming increasingly mainstream, as part of universities’ wider knowledge exchange or civic engagement strategies. However, considerable barriers to engagement between academic researchers and policymakers remain. These include significant cultural differences, lack of incentives and investment, mismatched timescales and approaches, lack of access to academic research, and difficulties in parsing an ever-growing volume of information.

Policymakers often express a desire for a streamlined, “one stop” interface with academics to enable them to quickly and easily reach the right expertise at the right time. Given such barriers, this is much easier said than done.

Too often, where interaction does happen, it is short-term, ad hoc, dependent on individual contacts, and enabled through fixed-term funding rather than sustainable approaches. Many institutions lack both the capacity and the necessary capabilities to respond to policy needs.

There is no systematic mechanism for policymakers to engage with universities in order to identify and access the expertise they need, or for universities and researchers to identify policy needs, still less provide a coordinated response. This means that policymakers do not necessarily have access to the best evidence, only that which is most readily available.

What is now required is a serious focus on establishing a more systematic and sustainable approach. Such an approach requires organisational capacity and individual capability, alongside greater collaboration and coordination across the academic-policy ecosystem.

The policy connection cavalry is here

This is where the Universities Policy Engagement Network (UPEN) comes in. Established in 2018 UPEN is a voluntary network of over 120 universities, research centres, and policy organisations across the UK, currently hosted at UCL. Our university members comprise diverse institutions, from large, research-intensive to small, specialist institutions, across all parts of the UK. UPEN provides an interface between all areas of academic research and public policymaking, with strong relationships with the UK’s four national legislatures and 25 government departments and growing links with local and regional policymakers.

UPEN has until now been powered by the contributions of our members: both financial and, crucially, time. With a new funding award from Research England and ESRC, we now have the opportunity to build a national “connective infrastructure” which can respond to growing policy demand, at multiple levels of government, for academic expertise and evidence.

Enhancing UPEN’s ability to provide this interface will enable us as a sector to work in a more coordinated and efficient way. It will also foster greater diversity in academic-policy engagement by ensuring a greater breadth of evidence and voices are heard. And it will build on previous UKRI investments to underpin stronger collaboration and collective action to harness the full potential of the university research base.

Our new programmes of work will focus on three key areas. First, supporting universities to strengthen their academic engagement with public policy by enhancing individual and organisational capabilities. Second, strengthening place-based approaches to academic-policy engagement. Third, developing a national knowledge brokerage function to mobilise academic expertise to respond at the point of policy need.

The UK government is grappling with multiple complex and cross-cutting policy challenges – from bolstering a weak economy, to improving energy security and sustainability, to tackling problems with the health service, to addressing housing needs. It is time for us, as a sector, to better leverage the knowledge of universities to address these challenges in order to deliver better outcomes for citizens across the UK.