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CAPE: building connections between academics and policymakers

This project started in March 2020 and ended in December 2024

A research project exploring how engagement and collaboration can improve policy effectiveness.

Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement (CAPE) is a partnership between University College London and the universities of Cambridge, Manchester, Northumbria and Nottingham, in collaboration with the Government Office for Science, the Parliamentary Office for Science & Technology, Nesta and the Transforming Evidence Hub.

Funded by Research England, it is a four-year knowledge exchange and research project that aims to create effective and sustained engagement between academics and policy professionals in different geographical and policy contexts across England. We want to foster greater understanding and cooperation between universities, national government, Parliament and regional and local authorities.

CAPE is unique in that it not only aims to implement a range of mechanisms that should improve academic-policy engagement but that it has an embedded evaluation team – the Transforming Evidence Hub. Through the evaluation of our programmes, we want to generate and share insight across the sector by focussing on the following research questions:

How do we define successful or effective academic-policy engagement (for both universities and policy stakeholders)?
What structures, mechanisms and incentives do universities need to have in place in order to best deliver what policy stakeholders want?
What are the specific opportunities and challenges of academic-policy engagement at different levels of government (local/regional/national)?

Why did we do this?

As Nesta works towards improving the lives of millions through its new strategy, our role as a system shaper is vital to ensuring our missions’ impact. We know that fostering the environments and capacities to use, generate, and mobilise evidence is critical to maximising our resources, partnerships and interventions that have a meaningful impact. Despite decades of investment by the UK government into initiatives that highlight the importance of evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM), there remains little understanding of how academic research is used in practice, or how to build individual, team, and institutional capacity to understand what good – and good enough – evidence means in terms of how it affects policy decisions.

As a member of CAPE, Nesta helped to diversify, design, test and evaluate a series of interventions to improve engagement between academics and policymakers. These included knowledge exchange events, seed funding for collaborative research projects, fellowships and training. Using a collaborative process, and with support from the embedded evaluation team throughout, we hoped to generate a better understanding of how we can shape decision-making systems to make greater use of evidence and research expertise in creating the positive social changes we want to see.

What did we do?

The CAPE consortium aims to improve the quality, accessibility and agility of research into decision-making. To make evidence-informed decision making a reality, we need to equip decision-makers, researchers and knowledge brokers alike with the capabilities, motivation and opportunities that enable behaviour change towards greater collaboration and knowledge exchange. This is known as the behaviour change wheel.

Nesta’s Evidence and Experimentation team led the delivery of CAPE’s two training workstreams: one geared at improving policy engagement capacity for university-based researchers and knowledge brokers, and one focused on improving evidence use and academic engagement capability for decision-makers.

Our CAPE learning programmes for policy professionals drew upon Nesta’s breadth of expertise in providing evidence use and scrutiny training to policy professionals and practitioners, such as our partnership with the Government Campus (previously Civil Service Learning).

The way that people use evidence to make decisions is reflective of how research and knowledge is interpreted and used within different environments. By understanding how people engage with research at both the individual and infrastructural level, we can improve the conditions that allow for evidence to be embedded in policy to create impact.

CAPE learning programmes helped participants to develop the knowledge, attitudes, and skills to foster greater evidence use and academic engagement, and to allow for the creative exploration of barriers, and potential solutions, that help enable the sustainability of this learning within unique institutional contexts. To inform this work, we drew on the evidence for what we know supports effective professional learning and behaviour change. By utilising a co-creative approach, we ensured that learning was related to the live policy problems of our policy professionals, and reflected their decision-making environments.

Through the delivery of this training, Nesta ultimately aimed to ensure government services are designed and delivered on the basis of the best available evidence to ensure they are effective and support the best possible outcomes for recipients of these services.

Through the university workstream, Nesta facilitated a programme dedicated to understanding, aligning and improving policy engagement learning offers in higher education institutions. We wanted to develop a better understanding of existing programmes geared towards improving engagement with policymakers. We also wanted to identify opportunities for developing new training and skills focussed on practical implementation.

First, we will identify and map existing training providers and courses focused on research translation and policy engagement available to CAPE partner universities, and identify gaps in their current provision. We will then bring together expertise from across the policy-academic engagement sector to co-design content that addresses these gaps and equips learners with an improved understanding of public policy and practical skills for policy engagement and research translation. By creating a community of practice and train-the-trainer resources, we ensured the training content was replicable and adaptable to unique university contexts.

What did we achieve?

We developed the Engaging with evidence toolkit for policymakers to understand how to harness data, information, knowledge, and evidence to inform live problems and understand what ‘good’ and ‘better’ evidence use means in policy practice.

Kuranda Morgan

Evidence Lead, Evidence and Experimentation

Kuranda worked as the evidence lead in the Evidence and Experimentation team, championing efforts to improve evidence use and academic engagement capability for Nesta and our partners.

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