ARI Research Engagement Fellow

Government Departments have produced short documents summarising their research priorities called Areas of Research Interest (ARIs). This allows researchers to better understand what Government needs to know. Through this Research Engagement Fellowship I will interact with both policy and research experts to help the Government make the most of these ARIs.

This will involve working closely with a Policy Engagement Fellow (Kathryn Oliver), and with research and policy experts to develop recommendations for future programmes of work to address these priorities. To do this, we will draw on our social science expertise about the production and use of evidence for policy, especially on effective facilitation and collaboration. Our work involves a number of stages:

1. Prioritisation: As the Research Engagement Fellow, I will support the work of the Policy Engagement fellow in her work with the Departmental chief scientific advisers, directors of analysis and heads of the Policy Profession to explore how the ARIs were produced and by whom; the extent of academic involvement; and the potential for further refinement.

Drawing on analysis on the content and themes of the ARIs, we will hold a meeting to prioritise a set of key ARIs and work out what makes them useful to different stakeholders. We will include cross-cutting ARIs, and those focusing on Departmental priorities, choosing ARIs developed in different ways. This will help us learn about the potential for collaborative working across government, and the different ways ARIs can be made useful.

2. Identifying relevant expertise: I will locate relevant research expertise across external centres such as the as What Works Centres, across disciplinary boundaries including (but not limited to) the social sciences.

3. Connecting and refining ARIs through a process of co-design: We will bring together these experts in a series of 6 workshops designed to move from the initial ARIs, to more specific research questions. We will develop recommendations for researchers, funders and government together, which may shape future funding calls, policy or evidence briefs, or lead to specific research collaborations.

These workshops may be challenging as participants will have different priorities and practices. We will overcome these with tested facilitation approaches, using our experience as supportive and proactive leaders.

4. Producing guidance on developing capability for research-policy engagement: I will play an active role in two roundtable events to maximise learning from these Fellowships: (1) With GO-Science and stakeholders, on Optimising the development and prioritisation of ARIs within government, to inform the development of ARIs in the future, and (2) with research funders, and research stakeholders on Supporting Effective and Ethical Research-Policy Engagement, to showcase our work and discuss how the research funding community and academy can respond to themes emerging from ARIs.

Throughout all stages of the Fellowship, we want learn about what types of infrastructures, initiatives and investments best support effective and ethical policy-academic engagement. We will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of collaboration, learn how to support government effectively, and about the process of evidence use more broadly. We will capture this learning through regular discussions with our advisory group, keeping regular notes on our reflections, and where possible formal research methods.

This will be very useful for the UK Government, ESRC and UKRI (and potentially for other governments, e.g. US) who want to know how to maximise the value of research investments (UKRI, 2019). We will work with ESRC and GO-Science to find ways to share this learning with the wider policy, funding and research communities.