#OvertonGrant: How can we build effective long-term regional research-policy-practice partnerships?

In 2023 Overton launched the Policy Impact Micro Grant - a scheme to fund research projects that explore the policy landscape and its relationship with evidence and the academic sphere. 

Some of the funding was allocated to Sarah Jasim, a researcher at the London School of Economics & Political Science (NIHR Applied Research Collaboration North Thames), and colleagues at the London Research and Policy Partnership. Here, she and her colleague Germán Andrés Alarcón Garavito detail their project and explore their findings. They focus on regional evidence use and how collaboration can help create policy designed to address the needs of a specific people or area. They set out what specific skills are needed to build effective and long-term partnerships between local policymakers, practitioners and researchers.

Who are LRaPP?

The London Research and Policy Partnership (LRaPP) aims to improve and facilitate the way academic researchers, policy professionals and practitioners from the business sector and civil society work together in London. 

At LRaPP, we are using our own experiences of research-policy-practice (RPP) engagement, and our collated insights from qualitative data analysis to develop knowledge brokerage products and services to facilitate regional RPP and long-term partnership-building in London. Two of our major areas of focus are ‘capacity’ and ‘capability-building’ through training to equip and enable various diverse communities with skills, capabilities and opportunities to build effective long-term regional research-policy-practice partnerships.

The importance of collaboration

RPP partnerships support evidence based policymaking - this type of collaboration helps ensure that knowledge from academic research gets used by decision makers in local government, as well as by business and voluntary and community sectors. 

But what skills are required to build effective long-term regional RPP partnerships? 

To answer this, we drew on insights from a rapid evidence review of previous training examples* of this type of partnership. We also incorporated findings from a secondary analysis of qualitative data on RPP engagement and building long-term partnerships within London. We held a co-production workshop that brought together academic researchers, policy professionals and practitioners from various policy areas and academic disciplines to identify and synthesise the types of skills needed for building effective long-term regional RPP partnerships.

What are regional partnerships?

In this context, there is little clarity on the definition of regions, specifically around their geographical or population-based boundaries. This can cause confusion when thinking about the scope of regional efforts for building regional RPP partnerships. Some regions might have clear geographical areas, but for others social, historical, or economic factors may be more relevant.

“One person's region is another person's name or even nation.”
-Policy professional community

This lack of consistency has dampened understanding of regional RPP engagement and its impact on the relationships and partnerships, which will inevitably cause confusion as the agenda for place-based impact and policy making becomes more significant.

What skills are needed?

Our project identified the following skills as critical to building effective RPP partnerships:

• Capability-building

We found it was extremely important for individuals to optimise how they communicate and connect with the other communities, in order to build knowledge exchange opportunities. There were two key elements to this.

There was a lot of reference to digital presence, and if institutional / personal websites or profiles were not updated, how this might limit prospective brokerage or engagement opportunities. We found that a person having no (or a reduced) digital presence could hamper their attempts to engage or have impact, as potential collaborators would be less aware of them and their expertise in a specific area. Even when digital presence did exist, any barriers to contacting them easily also had a detrimental effect - e.g institutional administrative barriers, such as compliance guidelines (i.e., requesting permissions, forms) could put people off.

During engagement and partnership-building, being able to highlight and communicate what experience, resources, and knowledge everyone can (or cannot) offer can help to clarify the scope of the engagement or partnership and prevent misunderstandings and inconsistencies.

• Knowledge

We found that academic researchers and policy professionals need support to understand how the other community operates and functions

For academic researchers, being able to understand the process of policy making, existing policy priorities, and how to address them would be useful.

“Academia needs to understand the political nature of our work.”
-Policy professional community

For policy professionals, improved awareness of what researchers can (and cannot) offer, the institutional resources that might be available, and what differentiates the academic research sector from other organisations such as private research consultancies, would also be useful. Improved knowledge and understanding of the value of other actors in the wider research-practice-policy ecosystem can be really helpful.

• Managing expectations

Having realistic expectations are important for partnership building, and we found it can be problematic when there are mismatches in assumptions.

“I think people need to have realistic expectations of what the university can deliver in what time frame.”
-Academic research community

Expectations on time (schedules, deadlines), outcomes (milestones, final outputs), or funding (either to start or continue working together) are important in shaping effective engagement and building long-term partnerships.

“it would be useful to just discuss informally potential policy solutions with academics without funding expectations to develop research.”
-Academic research community

Early and transparent communication, coupled with a clear understanding of each other’s experiences, expertise and skills are important. These can help to avoid any misunderstanding of others’ roles and capacities, preventing frustrations and the decline of partnerships.

• Relationships

We discovered that relationship building or people skills were important - knowing or being willing to learn how to build collaborative and timely relationships was seen as an enabler to effective engagement. 

We found it was important to utilise activities such as ‘stakeholder mapping’ as an early, key step to engagement and forming relationships. Activities such as these, were seen as useful to use personal connections as a starting point, or build from institutional memory (i.e. starting from a previous colleague's partnership efforts) to build early awareness of relevant networks and interest groups.

In some cases, unnoticed stakeholder mapping opportunities could include repurposing previous funding bids, tenders, or commissioning requests; or forming new relationships and engagement opportunities through funding or networking scheme events, and knowledge-sharing networks.

• Translation of evidence

An essential aspect of RPP partnerships is the dissemination and communication of research or policy outcomes. 

If evidence or outcomes are presented or communicated in an unclear way, this can serve as a barrier that limits the use of evidence in policy making. To avoid this, it is important to couple technical knowledge (i.e. scholarly insights) with clear outputs (i.e. policy briefs, blogs, and position statements) and interpersonal skills that can enable compelling arguments to convince or influence future decisions. 

It can also be valuable for academic researchers to recognise what can be considered as evidence in policy making and how it is used to improve translation of evidence, or how research evidence can feed into policy making or practice decisions. 

“There is a gap between the delivery of evidence and the ability to transform that into action, and neither the academic nor the policy person is equipped to do that”
- Policy professional community

The importance of differentiating what policy professionals need versus what academic researchers can offer was highlighted, particularly in the co-production workshop. One participant stressed that often policy professionals wanted to connect with academic researchers for their subject-matter expertise, which can run in opposition to researchers’ incentives. That is, they want to collaborate in ways that demonstrate the type of impact that is recognised within their own community - i.e. where specific insights from specific research papers are taken up by decision makers, which can be evidenced in exercises like the REF.

“It is important to have clarity in terms of what academics are looking to provide and what policymakers need.”
-Academic research community

If general expertise is required, one approach could be to organise a panel of academic experts to provide their input on a particular policy question based on their knowledge. But if decision makers want to answer a specific question, solve a specific policy problem or get evidence to support the creation of new programmes etc, then this is likely to require a specific collaboration partnership and may call for a higher level of funding and time dedication.

*Previous training examples

Of the several examples of training, support, and resources for RPP engagement, we identified the following. 

Table 1. Training examples

Access and funding for training opportunities were restricted to particular audiences, which limited their impact (likely related to providers not prioritising building long-term research-policy-practice partnerships). 

These examples of training and resource provision focused on either local, national and international levels, but none exclusively focused on regional engagement. Most examples were aimed at academic researchers (from different career stages), and some at policy professionals – but usually treating these communities as separate cohorts. Insights from our qualitative data showed that separate training offers aimed at different communities within the RPP landscape can lead to enhancing differences in understanding, contributing to divides between communities, rather than bridging them. 

Next steps 

We must consider training or capacity development to address the skills gaps needed to build effective, long term, regional research-policy-practice partnerships. Future training initiatives should bring together policy professionals, practitioners, the academic research community, and other actors such as civil society and the business sector.

Learning how to map stakeholders and networks, how to understand regional policy processes and priorities, and how to translate evidence effectively and clearly for diverse audiences are key for future training programmes. These are currently being developed by the London Research and Policy Partnership as an outcome of this work. This type of training has been identified as an important need and would be especially valuable for academic researchers to know how to best use their expertise and resources to address public policy priorities.