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Reported by Tom Pryke, ESRC-funded CSaP Policy Intern (February - April 2016).
The Policy Fellows’ working lunch for February was generously hosted by the British Academy. Chaired by CSaP’s Dr Robert Doubleday, the event was well-attended by fellows from a very wide range of organisations including: the Behavioural Insight Team, BIS, the Bank of England, DCLG, DCMS, DfID, DfT, DH, FCA, FSA and the GLA. Proceedings took place in the splendid Library Room, where we discussed the many strengths of the British Academy whilst enjoying a sandwich lunch.
We began with an overview of the Academy’s strengths, which centred on the “enormous resource of expertise” represented by their Fellowship of over 1000. It was recognised that the Academy has significant convening power, and the ability to provide a safe space for high-level conversations. Discussions were then opened up to explore how the Academy might build better relationships with government to improve the integration of social science expertise and evidence into policy. The diverse group responded positively to the contemporary policy challenges being addressed by the Academy, and suggested further avenues that might be productively explored in the future.
Fellows agreed that the Academy is uniquely placed to contribute to our understanding of broader systemic and cross-government issues, such as climate change and obesity. This is very far from the historic stereotype of learned societies being, as one Fellow put it, “a dining club for distinguished academics”. Discussions then moved on to identify the potential benefits to be gained by building more informal networks, both between Academy Fellows, and linking Fellows to policymakers.
Policy Fellows were keen to share their thoughts on big issues that deserved the Academy’s attention. These included: matters of devolution and Functional Economic Geography; learning organisations and the policy process; institutional knowledge, and the framing of key government priorities, such as productivity. We concluded with a lively discussion of whether, and how, expertise in the social sciences and humanities is identifiable within government, sparked by one Fellow’s observation; “if I wanted a historian, there’s no-one to call”.
This event is part of a continuing collaboration between CSaP and the British Academy, following CSaP’s 2015 conference on How can government make better use of expertise and evidence from the humanities? Details of the conference can be found here.
(Banner image from M Cheung on Flickr)
