Government and academia: Conclusion

Government and academia have made progress in engaging with each other more effectively. The civil service today offers academics a range of avenues to feed their evidence, insight and expertise into policy making processes. And the research community is more alive to the needs of policy makers – and savvier about how to engage with government. These are developments that should be celebrated. There are examples of best practice all across the policy–research interface, and successful initiatives have proven the value, and impact, of a strong relationship between policy makers and academics.

But government cannot be complacent. It should recognise that there is even more it can do to effectively capture and channel researchers’ increased interest in policy impact. Pockets of best practice should be expanded to encompass increasing swathes of the civil service. Various disparate initiatives should be joined up more effectively. And the impact of interventions should be evaluated and fed back into decisions about how to conduct academic–policy engagement.

Most importantly, central government departments need to think more actively about what it is that they want from academics, who should lead efforts on researcher engagement and how different mechanisms for attracting academic input will be used to achieve that. To this end, departments should develop researcher engagement strategies that articulate how an engagement system can best deliver on departmental objectives and clarify these priorities externally. But for these strategies to be translated into practice, genuine shifts in the incentives for officials and a transformation in the culture in which officials operate need to back them up.

This report has set out the steps that government could take to bring researchers closer to policy making. Implementing our recommendations would require senior decision makers to take engagement with researchers seriously, and invest more time, energy and resources in getting it right. But there is a good case for doing so – the prize is better policy making that delivers more for the people of the UK.