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The latest new Fellow to join the Policy Leaders Fellowship is Nadia Calviño, European Commission Director-General for Budget, whose responsibilities include the EU's financial programming, annual budgets, accounting and financial rules.
Nadia will join other recently elected Fellows - including Helen Edwards (Department for Communities and Local Government), Paul Grice (Scottish Parliament), Antonia Romeo (Cabinet Office) and Chris Wormald (Head of Civil Service Policy Profession) - at the Fellowship's eighth roundtable meeting in June.
Designed around the needs of departmental leaders, the Fellowship addresses the appetite for longer-term thinking and challenging perspectives, and the value of a kernel of thought-leaders engaging on politically neutral ground and with a shared vision. The Fellowship meets once a term in a roundtable format, tackling issues such as the intelligent use of modelling in government, the risks and opportunities of AI, and the role of expert networks in policy making. Fellows also have the opportunity to participate in one-to-one meetings with academics on their individual issues of concern.
The Policy Leaders Fellowship is now into its third year of operation, bringing DGs and Permanent Secretaries in Whitehall (and their peers elsewhere) together with leading academics in support of open and evidence-based policy making.
Benefits to the Fellows include access to senior academics across all disciplines; membership of a network of high-level policy professionals; access through the network to structured interactions, including the opportunity to convene bespoke discussions; and most of all, the challenge to thinking which is characteristic of the Fellowship process, promoting innovation and creative approaches.
The first cadre of Fellows to be elected have now come to the end of their two years; we are grateful to the inaugural Fellows for pioneering the concept from which the new Fellows will now benefit.
(Banner image from Stuart Chalmers via Flickr)