Perspectives on academic impact and expert advice to policymakers

A blog post prompted by this fascinating post by Dr Christiane Gerblinger: Are experts complicit in making their advice easy for politicians to ignore?

There is a lot of advice out there for people seeking to make an ‘impact’ on policy with their research, but some kinds of advice must seem like they are a million miles apart.

For the sake of brevity, here are some exemplars of the kinds of discussion that you might find:

Advice from former policymakers

Here is what you could have done to influence my choices when I was in office. Almost none of you did it.

(for a nicer punchline see How can we demonstrate the public value of evidence-based policy making when government ministers declare that the people ‘have had enough of experts’?)

Advice from former civil servants

If you don’t know and follow the rules here, people will ignore your research. We despair when you just email your articles.

(for nicer advice see Creating and communicating social research for policymakers in government)

Advice from training courses on communication

Be concise and engaging.

Advice from training courses on policy impact

Find out where the action is, learn the rules, build up relationships and networks, become a trusted guide, be in the right place at the right time to exploit opportunities, give advice rather than sitting on the fence.

(see for example Knowledge management for policy impact: the case of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre)

Advice from researchers with some experience of engagement

Do great research, make it relevant and readable, understand your policymaking context, decide how far you want to go have an impact, be accessible, build relationships, be entrepreneurial.

(see Beware the well-intentioned advice of unusually successful academics)

Advice from academic-practitioner exchanges

Note the different practices and incentives that undermine routine and fruitful exchanges between academics, practitioners, and policymakers.

(see Theory and Practice: How to Communicate Policy Research beyond the Academy and ANZOG Wellington).

Advice extrapolated from policy studies

Your audience decides if your research will have impact; policymakers will necessarily ignore almost all of it; a window of opportunity may never arise; and, your best shot may be to tailor your research findings to policymakers whose beliefs you may think are abhorrent.

(discussed in how much impact can you expect from your analysis? and book The Politics of Policy Analysis)

Inference from my study of UK COVID-19 policy

Very few expert advisers had a continuous impact on policy, some had decent access, but almost all were peripheral players or outsiders by choice.

(see The UK government’s COVID-19 policy: what does ‘guided by the science’ mean in practice? and COVID-19 page)

Inference from Dr Gerblinger

Experts ensure that they ignored when: ‘focussing extensively on one strand of enquiry while sidestepping the wider context; expunging complexity; and routinely raising the presence of inconclusiveness’.

What can we make of all of this advice?

One way to navigate all of this material is to make some basic distinctions between:

Sensible basic advice to early career researchers

Know your audience, and tailor your communication accordingly; see academic-practitioner exchange as two-way conversation rather than one-way knowledge transfer.

Take home message: here are some sensible ways to share experiences with people who might find your research useful.

Reflections from people with experience

It will likely not reflect your position or experience (but might be useful sometimes).

Take home message: I think this stuff worked for me, but I am not really sure, and I doubt you will have the same resources.

Reflections from studies of academic-practitioner exchange

It tends to find minimal evidence that people are (a) evaluating research engagement projects, and (b) finding tangible evidence of success (see Research engagement with government: insights from research on policy analysis and policymaking)

Take home message: there is a lot of ‘impact’ work going on, but no one is sure what it all adds up to.

Policy initiatives such as the UK Research Excellence Framework, which requires case studies of policy (or other) impact to arise directly from published research.

Take home message: I have my own thoughts, but see Rethinking policy ‘impact’: four models of research-policy relations

Reflections from people like me

Policy studies can be quite dispiriting. It often looks like I am saying that none of these activities will make much of a difference to policy or policymaking. Rather, I am saying to beware the temptation to turn (a) studies that describe policymaking complexity (e.g. 500 Words) into an agent-centred story of heroically impactful researchers (see for example the Discussion section of this article on health equity policy).

Take home message: don’t confuse studies of policymaking with advice for policy participants.

In other words, identify what you are after before you start to process all of this advice. If you want to engage more with policymakers, you will find some sensible practical advice. If you want to be responsible for a fundamental change of public policy in your field, I doubt any of the available advice will help (unless you seek an explanation for failure).