Policy Change Isn’t the Only Goal: A Guide to What Policy Engagement Can Achieve

Key features in a nutshell

• Avoid the ‘impact trap’: Direct policy change is rare, multicausal, and slow. Treat it as a potential long-term outcome rather than the sole benchmark of success
• Value the stepping stones: Building visibility, trust, and personal networks are vital standalone goals that create the foundation for future policy interactions
• Engagement is a two-way street: Understanding policymaking (better) is an important yet often overlooked, goal of policy engagement; policy engagement can enrich academic research by granting access to field data, revealing fresh research questions and testing the real-world relevance of hypotheses
• Embrace open-ended dialogues: Informing policymakers early – even with preliminary or non-definitive findings – helps frame emerging issues long before crises or legislation occur

Why do the goals matter?

Before diving into formats, actors, and institutions, crosscutting institutions, and teaching and learning methods, every policy engagement journey must start with a fundamental question: What are we actually trying to achieve?

In line with the University of Oxford’s widely used definition, we view policy engagement as an umbrella term describing ‘the many ways researchers and policymakers connect and explore common interests at various stages in their respective research and policymaking processes.’

To properly plan, resource, and evaluate these connections, both researchers and knowledge mobilisers must clarify their specific goals upfront. In practice, misaligned or unrealistic expectations are the single biggest driver of frustration in science-policy interactions.

The spectrum of policy engagement goals

Rather than viewing engagement through an ‘all-or-nothing’ lens, it helps if we understand goals as a spectrum ranging from foundational network-building to direct policy influence:

1. Direct policy change: Highly ambitious and rarely immediate

Seeing policymakers take up your recommendations is the goal most researchers think of first – and also the hardest to achieve for two reasons. First, policy change is rarely attributable to a single science-policy initiative: researchers, NGOs, and the media often all contribute to a shift over time, making any one contribution hard to isolate. Second, policy change doesn’t happen in a vacuumbut depends on several preconditions, which are themselves worth treating as goals in their own right (see below). Researchers and knowledge mobilisers should avoid treating policy change as the only legitimate goal of engagement; doing so is a recipe for frustration.

2. Raising visibility, building trust, and expanding networks

If you look at the researchers who regularly sit on advisory boards, conduct commissioned research, or testify at parliamentary hearings, you will notice the same names appearing repeatedly. Why? Beyond their academic achievements, their involvement relies heavily on (institutional) visibility, long-standing trust, and established personal networks. Raising your profile and building mutual trust are critical standalone goals that require time and continuity. Acknowledging this prevents frustration when launching new policy brief series or hosting inaugural policy events.

3. Mutual learning, understanding policymaking and gaining ideas for your own research: Understanding how policymaking works helps researchers explain the relevance of their findings, draft realistic policy recommendations or options, and identify the right audience – Members of Parliament, policy officers in ministries – along with the right channels and windows of opportunity. No researcher becomes a policy expert overnight, and that’s perfectly fine. While formal documents like government strategies, party platforms, and policy analyses from think tanks, NGOs, and associations are publicly available, the implicit, unwritten knowledge of how things actually work can only be picked up by talking to policymakers directly. Enabling open conversation with policymakers, purely to learn how policymaking works, is therefore an important goal in its own right. Policy engagement can also benefit your own research directly. Talking to policymakers can surface new perspectives that lead to new research questions or hypotheses and can open doors to data, interview partners, or institutions willing to disseminate a survey on your behalf.

4. Open-ended informing of policymakers
   Research findings don’t always translate into policy change. They might contradict the government’s current priorities, or a fast-moving policy situation might outpace findings that aren’t yet fully robust – think of the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. Researchers may also arrive at important findings while remaining genuinely unsure what policy recommendation follows. Should researchers hold back from engaging with policymakers in cases like these? Certainly not. It takes policymakers time to build up an understanding of a salient issue, and the sooner they have access to scientific expertise – caveats and all – the better.

Sources and further reading

University of Oxford (2024), Policy Engagement. Accessed on 10 April 2024.

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