King's College London

Towards the end of last year the Treasury published its Areas of Research Interest (ARIs) – an indication of the questions it would like answers to from researchers, both academic and otherwise. This is important, because the Treasury is one of the last major departments to publish their ARIs, and because the Treasury is perhaps the most consequential department in His Majesty’s Government. Answer these questions and have even a small impact on the Treasury’s thinking, and you can have an enormous impact on the future direction of the country.

Despite Impact being an important component of the Research Excellence Framework, thinking about conducting research in this way is still somewhat alien to academic researchers. Many of us are in favour of evidence-based policy, but this often means that we would like the government to listen to our evidence, and make their policy off the back of it.

One of the great joys of being an academic is the freedom, within certain limits, to study that which we find interesting, and to dedicate a life to peering deeply at a particular topic. Where we are susceptible to outside pressure, the pressure to “publish or perish” keeps us aligned with the norms and trends within our own fields. This is valuable – and is a sensible way to incrementally answer important questions, with one paper building upon the next, and all of us standing on the shoulders of giants.

Where this way of working runs aground can be seen in the government’s Areas of Research Interest – areas where government has a clear need to answer a particular question, but where they have found that researchers haven’t answered it yet (or, less commonly, that they question has been answered but it’s not yet been communicated effectively to government).

What we need, then, is policy-based evidence-making, not evidence-based policymaking. This requires us to step away, at least partially, from what we think is interesting – or even what we consider to be important – and refocus on answering questions that are of interest to policymakers.

If the Department for Education is grappling with how to safely reduce entry to care, we should turn our attention to that. If the Department for Work and Pensions is looking to find the most effective way of alleviating poverty, that should be our focus. Not every academic, and not all the time, but if we’re going to be serious about impact, we need to do some serious listening to what policymakers would actually find useful, rather than trying to convince them to find useful that which we’ve already got.

Alongside the ARIs, the government’s What Works Network – a group of centres each dedicated to building evidence in a particular policy domain – can be a useful place to start, as they are focused on exactly this kind of work. But these do not cover every policy area, and crucially, none of them cover the Treasury – or perhaps, thought about differently, each of them covers a different area of policy. These centres cumulatively fund around £100 million of research a year – about half the total spending of the Economic and Social Research Council – and are only interested in funding things that are relevant to achieving impact. If we re-aligned our interests (and, dare I say it, our ways of working), we can find funding for our research, as well as a less theoretical route to making a difference in the world.

I am not proposing that all academic research be given over to this – or even that any academic devotes their entire time to it. But most social scientists I know are passionate about the world they study, and want to see it improve. Engaging with what government needs to know, and designing our research to try and help them out, must surely be the best way to change the world rather than merely describing it?