Will the rise and rise of policy institutes crack the impact ceiling?

With the UK’s recently elected Labour government establishing a raft of policy commissions and consultations to hone its agenda, academics are arguably as well placed as they have ever been to influence public life. However, having striking ideas backed by robust predictions of their likely benefits is often not enough to get noticed by policymakers.

“Many academics think that if they present the evidence for a policy, it should be obvious what should be done, and if a politician doesn’t do what the evidence suggests, they’re foolish or malign,” reflected Stephen Meek, founding director of the Institute for Policy and Engagement at the University of Nottingham.

“That’s why it’s important for academics [not only] to understand how knowledge is used in policymaking but also to think about the value of other things – like building collaborations or networks, and persuading the public,” said Meek, who was a senior civil servant at the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the Department for Education prior to starting Nottingham’s policy institute in 2018.

Increasingly, such institutes – created to connect an institution’s research to policymakers and the public – are taking the lead on driving policy impact, rather than leaving it to enterprising scholars with a direct line to their local MP, a friendly civil servant or a BBC local radio producer. The establishment of the University of Oxford’s Martin School in 2005 and King’s College London’s Policy Institute in 2012 has been followed in recent years by a host of imitators – with more to come. Only last month, the University of Leicester launched its Institute for Policy; City St George’s, University of London’s Finsbury Institute will open in the spring, while Ulster University’s Strategic Policy Unit opened its doors in October. And other universities – particularly modern ones seeking to improve their impact standing in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) – are thought to be planning their own centres.

Read director Diana Beech’s vision for the Finsbury Institute. 

For Meek, the push to professionalise policy engagement – an outcome of the increased emphasis on research impact since the 2014 REF began assessing and rewarding this work – is a wise one. “A university wouldn’t leave an academic to deal with business on their own, but it’s been assumed that academics can work in public policy – a similar yet different world. For many academics, it feels a bit scary or different to do this. It’s been our job [in policy institutes] to provide a framework that demystifies this work and find the right ways for academics to engage.”

Too often, lone-wolf academics will pitch ideas or studies to government departments that are easy to turn down, agreed former science minister David Willetts, reflecting on his early career as a Treasury adviser. “You would often hear that ‘if you just spent a little bit of money upfront, it will save vast amounts in future’ – that’s an argument that the Treasury hears every day,” said Willetts, speaking at the launch of Leicester’s policy institute last month. Academics needed to back up such overly familiar claims with compelling pilot studies, for instance.

Faced with scepticism in Whitehall and Westminster – which arguably reached a zenith under the previous Conservative government, which was often seen as hostile to UK academia – universities have increasingly asked their research policy institutes to spearhead their drive for impact – now worth 25 per cent of REF scores – in the policy arena.

However, that drive should not necessarily be directed solely at winning over MPs or civil servants, explained Meek. “There’s a tendency to think you need to get into Whitehall or Westminster to make a difference, but you might be better off working with an NGO, your city council or local police force – if you can show that something is working well at a local level, you’re better placed to persuade others to take a punt on a policy. MPs or select committees don’t have the immediate levers to change things, or there is too much at stake at a national level to bring about change.”

Source: 

Getty Images/iStock montage

Dialogue with local partners to effect policy change will become increasingly important as Labour devolves power to metro-mayor authorities, continued Meek, who left Nottingham last year to work as a consultant. Those powers are soon to include the ability to direct where regional innovation spending is directed. “On net zero, for instance, the evidence is more easily presented [at a local level],” Meek said, “as you can talk about new jobs or transition towards green technology – it’s hard to beat the [anti-green] populists on a national level, but you can do this if you start evidencing results locally.”

With so many possible routes to policy impact – local, national and international – the research policy institute is seen as increasingly important, particularly for social science or humanities academics, said Dan King, who leads on knowledge exchange at Research Consulting.

“There is a clear pathway to impact for scientists and engineers with spinouts or patents, but it’s trickier with other subjects – it’s rare for one piece of social science research to lead to a specific policy change,” said King, a former director of partnerships, local engagement and commercial services at Nottingham Trent University. Hence, given the centrality of the REF to distributing quality-related research funding, investment in research policy institutes should pay off financially if it highlights how an institution’s research is being productively used, he added.

The appetite for policy engagement is clearly there, with the UK’s network for policy engagement professionals, Universities Policy Engagement Network (UPEN), now representing 110 universities despite only having been founded in 2018.

Research funders have also been happy to fund much of this work, explained Kathryn Oliver, professor of evidence and policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, citing the Economic and Social Research Council’s “impact accelerator account”, worth £1.25 million for a five-year period that began in April 2023. In addition, Research England has committed £150 million over five years via its Policy Support Fund for similar engagement activities, which launched in 2021-22. “Research funders want to see bang for their buck, but, while they might fund excellent research, what do you do if it doesn’t have an impact? The answer has been to build infrastructure internally so research cuts through,” said Oliver.

Not every academic will be thrilled about the idea of a research policy institute micromanaging their interactions with relevant policymakers, however, King concedes. “For some academics, anything that is centrally driven or managed can be viewed with suspicion,” he says. “Whenever there is a push or pull to do something from ‘the centre’, there is a misperception that this is really about trophy hunting: that academics do all the work and ‘the centre’ takes the glory.”

Moreover, while many academics want to change the world, the time-consuming activity of policy engagement might be viewed as another burden, continues King. “Knowledge exchange is huge beast covering many things, but you might see it as a bit of teaching and a bit of research. If people are already really squeezed doing these things due to institutional funding pressures, this activity could suffer because it’s something less immediately demanding [of results] than those two key activities,” he said, noting how the UK sector’s engagements with industry fell in 2022-23, according to the recent National Centre for University and Business’ State of the Relationship 2024 report.

Academics may also be sceptical about their chances of success in the public policy realm. And with policy institutes absorbing significant amounts of academics’ time and institutions’ funding, there is increasing pressure to assess which kinds of engagement do actually work. That is a topic that has so far received little scrutiny, said the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Oliver, who, last July, published her evaluation of the £10 million Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement (CAPE) project, a three-year multi-university initiative, funded by Research England, to “support academic-policy engagement at scale”.

It has become increasingly popular to provide teaching buyouts to embed academics in government departments for between six and 12 months, but this is “very expensive” given that fellowships can be hit-or-miss, said Oliver.

“The individual fellow has a great time and develops in the government department, but these placements take a lot of effort to establish [and] when the academic gets back in the university setting, it’s not clear exactly what they’ll do with what they’ve learnt,” she continued. Hence, her verdict is that only about one in three fellowships prove cost-effective. “If you had an academic shadow a civil servant for a week, that might be a better way to show them how the policy landscape works,” she suggested.

Another more efficient form of policy engagement, in Oliver’s view, would see academics respond more enthusiastically to the regular “areas of research interest” calls published by the UK government. In November, for instance, the Treasury published 17 pages of questions on tax, the labour market and trade policy, on which officials were seeking research, while the Department for Science and Technology published a similar document on artificial intelligence last February.

“Universities could say, ‘Yes, we have 15 years of research on this and here’s a briefing’ – that is likely to have impact,” Oliver said. They could also follow up on the government’s suggested areas for future research. Admittedly, “researchers tend not to like researching things that other people have put forward”, but they may increasingly need to do so if they want to achieve policy influence, she said – particularly given prime minister Keir Starmer’s “mission-led” approach: “This government is expecting researchers to deliver for the nation – and that need for a culture of public service [among researchers] is much more explicit.”

Some may wonder whether universities’ growing array of policy institutes – staffed by a mixture of academics, PR specialists and assorted engagement specialists – will end up all knocking on the same doors, prompting weariness from policymakers who also receive myriad inputs from thinktanks, lobbyists and campaigners. Universities keen to protect their sober and inclusive brands might also find it difficult to champion the kinds of radical, attention-grabbing ideas that some of those bodies are able to propose.

In Oliver’s view, the key will be for research policy institutes to sufficiently differentiate themselves from each other: “Everyone is trying to figure out their USP at the moment and where they might contribute.”

Source: 

Getty Images/iStock montage

That agenda is already fairly well advanced, it would seem. The Policy Institute at King’s – led by the ex-Ipsos Mori pollster Bobby Duffy – has carved out a strong reputation for news-friendly research related to public attitudes thanks to its well-timed surveys, while the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath – founded in 2015 by Nick Pearce, a former head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank – is seen as world-leading in welfare and constitution issues.

Nottingham Trent University’s Nottingham Civic Exchange, founded in 2017, styles itself as a “place-based thinktank” and seeks the “direct application of academic work that has the potential to make positive change locally regionally and nationally”, while the University of Liverpool’s Heseltine Institute, launched in 2013, focuses on urban renewal. City St George’s Finsbury Institute has said it will focus on London’s financial centre, while Ulster’s looks to focus primarily on influencing the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Some high-profile research policy institutes – such as Oxford’s Martin School and the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy, founded in 2018 – can be more wide-ranging, reflected Oliver. “There’s a very different set of circumstances at play for these institutes – not just financial – as they can convene meetings in the way that other universities can’t,” she explained. “Everyone’s ready to go to an Oxford college for a few days for a conference.”

That said, there is no shortage of ambition from other research policy institutes without these inbuilt advantages. Nottingham’s institute recently published the findings of a commission on “A Just Transition to Net Zero” chaired by Labour’s former deputy leader Tom Watson, which invited local politicians, business leaders, students and academics to consider expert evidence on how life in the city might need to change to hit net-zero targets.

“Having someone like Tom, who isn’t an expert on climate transition but can give us insights into politics and how to build a narrative around change, brought a different approach to the discussions,” said Meek. “The nature of the dialogue was different to what you might have if academics were just talking to each other.”

Meanwhile, the University of Warwick’s newly-created Warwick Innovation District has recruited ex-business secretary Greg Clark to lead its mission “to ensure that education and research drives positive economic and societal impact in collaboration with the public and private sectors”.

In addition to external engagement – which, in Nottingham’s case, also encompasses podcasts, blogs, public lectures and science festivals – efforts by institutes to raise the profile of policy outreach within universities is also important, said Meek. His own runs awards for Nottingham academics who are particularly adept at it, and while “every year I worried we’d get no entries”, the reality is that “we always had excellent ones”, he says. Prior to 2014, “with a few exceptions, people had got out of the habit of doing this work”, he said, so the awards were launched to help with “showing this work is valued”.

With new metrics to measure success in this area – notably the Overton Index, which tracks citations in more than 17 million policy documents, as well as the REF – the journey of academic policy engagement from a hobbyist sideline for scholars to a structured and funded activity seems likely to continue. As REF 2029 looms into view and concentrates minds further, expect ever more research policy institutes to spout up and jostle for influence.