Pairing Schemes of the Rhine-Main Universities: The Policy Fellowship Programmes

Key features in a nutshell

• The Policy Fellowship Programmes of the Rhine-Main-Universities Darmstadt, Frankfurt, and Mainz allow policymaking professionals from regional and federal ministries, the European Commission and international organisations, NGOs, as well as journalists to visit the Rhine-Main-Universities to conduct meetings with scientists.
• The initiatives aim at providing practitioners with scientific expertise on the policy issues they are dealing with while the researchers learn about policy perspectives on their research topics.
• Record: 210 policymaking professionals have conducted about 2,800 meetings with about 730 scientists since 2016.

How does the format work?

The Rhine-Main Universities – an alliance of  Technical University Darmstadt, Goethe University Frankfurt, and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz – promote dialogue between scientists from various disciplines and policymakers via face-to-face meetings. The Rhine-Main Universities have established three dialogue programmes: The Mercator Science-Policy Fellowship Programme, the Science Meets Regions Fellowship, and the ENGAGE Policy Fellowship.

These programmes follow a very similar structure: The Rhine-Main Universities circulate calls for applications to hundreds of policymaking institutions, civil society organisations and media in Germany and abroad.

When applying to our programmes, policymaking professionals must elaborate on their need for academic expertise in motivation letters. Also, they have to provide a list of questions they would like to discuss with our scientists. Once accepted into the programmes, each policymaking professional receives a comprehensive list of researchers with whom they can meet. The policymaking professionals provide feedback on the list. The policy engagement unit at Frankfurt University schedules the meetings between the scientists and the policymaking professionals.

Each fellowship cohort conducts joint visits to the Frankfurt/Rhine-Main area twice during their fellowship, and each policymaker has meetings with approximately eight researchers during each visit. If the policy fellow needs scientific expertise in the future, they will have a network of 16 researchers they have already met and whom they can approach. Likewise, the participating researchers can approach their counterparts in policymaking institutions if they want to disseminate their knowledge. Our evaluations show that the participating policymakers and scientists are very content with the programmes. Both appreciate the office’s time efficiency and organisational support for policy engagement.

These face-to-face meetings have resulted in numerous follow-up activities such as joint events, talks by researchers at the institutions of policy professionals, and joint research projects.

Our fellowship programme brings professionals and scientists together in hundreds of meetings they would otherwise never meet. Our evaluation surveys show that about half of the researchers had no or only occasional contact with policymakers before participating in our programmes. The same observation applies to the participating policymaking professionals.

Thus, our dialogue initiatives prove that there is excellent potential for programmes bringing policymaking professionals and researchers together.

Challenges (and how to address them)

A very practical challenge is scheduling meetings with our scientists, who are often not at the universities daily. Thus, we must start planning the meetings three months in advance.

Another challenge is for the scientists to understand that the policy fellows are diverse. Some policy fellows have extensive knowledge of the topics they would like to discuss; they ask questions, such as “How does the use of smartphones affect the reading skills of children in primary schools?” Others are interested in rather big “big questions” in their policy fields (e.g., “How stable are financial markets?”), while some policy fellows use the time to gain an overview of unfamiliar topics (e.g. “What are algorithms?”).

Likewise, policymakers might talk with scientists who understand policymaking well while others speak to policymakers for the first time. We have prepared FAQ lists for policymakers and scientists and informed policymakers about the programme through bilateral phone calls or Zoom calls and an induction event.

Tasks and resources

Scientists

The programmes are very time-efficient for scientists. Since the meetings are informal, they do not have to invest much time in preparing them other than reading the topics of interest of the policy fellows.

Knowledge exchange managers and research managers (Support staff)

The Rhine-Main-Universities created two new positions to coordinate their policy-dialogue projects. Our tasks include managing the application process, identifying possible experts for policymakers, assisting policymakers and scientists with organisational issues, scheduling 350 meetings per year, and other tasks. The programme is very resource intensive regarding support staff because we tailor some 16 meetings to the needs of the policy fellow.

Policymakers

The policymakers must submit an application, which takes them a couple of hours to prepare. We recommend that they spare 30 minutes of preparation time for each of the 16 scheduled meetings with our scientists. They have to conduct the meetings with our scientists. We also ask our policy fellows to participate in preparatory sessions, a feedback call, and two rounds of evaluations.

Required funding

We spend about 80% of our budget on financing two full-time positions. We have a modest budget for joint events, public relations, and travel. Stiftung Mercator provides about 60 per cent of our funds, while the EU and the three Rhine-Main-Universities contribute 20 per cent each.

Our policy fellows must cover the costs of travel to the Frankfurt/Rhine-Main area, accommodation, and dinners. We do not charge the policy fellows; other institutions, like the Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge University or ETH Zürich, do so for their policy dialogue projects.

Sources and further reading

Tome Sandevski. How the Rine-Main Universities promote knowledge exchange between researchers and policymakers via face-to-face meetings. Knowledge of policy blog. 15 August 2023.  https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/blog/how-rhine-main-universities-promote-knowledge-exchange-between-researchers-policymakers-face-0_en

Do you want to know more about the policy engagement toolkit?

Do you want to share your experience in policy engagement? Do you think about contributing to the policy engagement toolkit? Feel free to contact Tome Sandevski via science-policy@pvw.uni-frankfurt.de