Tackling Enduring Policy Challenges: Lessons from a collaborative new approach

What happens if you bring policy, research and evaluation experts together to explore an enduring policy challenge? And how best to surface questions and begin to answer them with partners? 

That was the challenge we posed late last year over a series of email conversations between What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth and colleagues at UPEN.    

 Earlier this year, What Works Growth, UPEN Members, ONS Local, and the Institute for Employment Studies ran two workshops to test out a new way of collaborating across knowledge mobilisation organisations. The events brought together analysts and employment and skills teams from Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs) to discuss questions on economic inactivity. We particularly wanted to hear the questions – whether research, evaluation or data questions – that crop up in project after project.   

Fourteen of the sixteen Mayoral Combined Authorities and County Combined Authorities sent representatives, who talked openly with their peers and external organisations about what they don’t know. In the first session, we gathered a wide range of questions, over 200, and in the second session we helped officers from MCAs and CCAs prioritise them.   

Below are our key lessons for others to reflect on.  

Find your audience and meet them where they are

To get the right teams from MCAs to attend, we used existing connections and tracked down individuals from their Get Working Plans.   

Policymakers’ time is tight, and we knew that we’d be fighting for space in their calendars and inboxes. We used email and calendar invites so joining was as easy as any internal meeting, and kept the ask simple and the burden light: no prep work, and clear expectations.   

During the session, we cast a wide net for what questions we wanted to hear and gave plenty of examples of what they might look like. People felt able to ask about how to understand available data, as well as more complex requests.   

Be willing for the process to be messy

We weren’t sure that collaboration across these different organisations would work. We didn’t know what or how many questions policymakers would ask. And we couldn’t be certain that we’d have a prioritised list of questions at the end, as everyone might disagree.   

To handle all these uncertainties, we managed our own expectations. This would be an iterative process. Facilitators would help shape the structure of the workshops and take a semi-structured approach on the day itself. We held a debrief after the first session to reflect and adjust. Once we’d reviewed the questions, we held another meeting. And then another.   

When we invited the attendees, we managed their expectations too, emphasising that this was as much about building relationships and valuing the evidence as it was about the questions themselves. And at the end of the second workshop, we gave enough time for people from MCAs to share what they saw as next steps. Many of their next steps were around making the most of existing networks and how to share more with each other.   

It doesn’t stop here 

Gathering, sorting and prioritising questions is, as you can imagine, just the first part of the process. We are now focusing on 3 next steps:  

1.  Firstly, we’ve secured support from our colleagues as ONS Local, who will be looking at all the data-focused questions that matter to local policymakers. They will be working with us to share ‘answers’, challenges and dead ends with us and our participant, for a better awareness of the art of the possible, as well as the gaps in our current knowledge and approaches. If you would like to know more about these questions, do reach out.    

2. Secondly, we know there are a huge number of engaged, informed and passionate academics in your universities who will be interested in the wider question bank. We are looking to showcase these questions and explore how researchers may be able to respond to them. As a first step, we’d love to hear from colleagues who’d like to explore these questions and share any responses to them.  

3. Lastly, we think this approach can be replicated for other policy topics and we’d like to share and evaluate its use beyond our first pilot. Whilst it could have a local growth dimension and engage What Works Growth, we are also very happy to share the process beyond our policy field to other areas tackling enduring policy challenges.      

Interested in getting in touch to learn more about this process or explore the questions gathered in the workshops? Email Rich Pickford at richard.pickford@ntu.ac.uk to find out more.