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Rachel Fisher is Deputy Director for Land Use Policy at Defra. Her work lies at the intersection of urban development and environmental enhancement, where she is responsible for developing and delivering environmental planning reform policy, local nature recovery strategies, and biodiversity net gain.
My work mainly focusses on the environment and the built environment. We’re trying to understand how land is used, predominantly in England, and the drivers of change. My team’s work includes biodiversity net gain – a new approach to development that makes sure habitats for wildlife are left in a measurably better state than they were before the development. We are also leading on local nature recovery strategies, strategic spatial plans for nature recovery and nature-based solutions. We’re thinking even more upstream about how we make decisions, and how land is going to change in order to meet climate and environment statutory commitments.
"My team and I have been working on a land use framework for England for the last three years. At the same time, I’ve been a CSaP Policy Fellow looking at similar themes and I think the land use framework will therefore be better informed by a broader range of expertise when it is published."
I joined the Policy Fellowship quite early on in my time at Defra. Having spent most of my career working on policy in the built environment, I realised that my knowledge of rural and agricultural land management was very limited, and that speaking to experts in these areas would probably be quite useful. Cambridge is basically the only university that runs a land economy programme, so it seemed perfect. And it was also nice to have some days out of Whitehall.
"Being part of the Policy Fellows network has opened up many new opportunities – one of the most useful being the opportunity to just talk to people about my work but away from the work setting."
At the time I approached CSaP, they seemed to be doing a lot of work on climate and the environment, and I was invited to various roundtable discussions which, in addition to the very focussed one-to-one meetings that were part of my Fellowship schedule, has been really helpful in terms of building my own personal network of useful contacts. I’ve also shared with my team all the reading material that the academics I’ve met with have very kindly sent me.
One example that stands out is my meeting with Professor of Politics and Public Policy, Dennis Grube, and his book Why Governments Get It Wrong. I have found the book incredibly useful, and he was great to talk to. I don't think I've ever laughed that much in a work-based conversation.
His book and the way that he frames policy making is incredibly helpful and I have recommended it to my team. Interestingly, this is the one meeting I had that was totally outside the actual questions I was there to discuss – it was more a meta kind of policy making discussion. I found that really helpful, and it stands out due to his ability to communicate policy making in an accessible way.
Another useful meeting was with Sarah Dillon, Professor of Literature and Public Humanities in the Faculty of English. We talked about story and narrative as an equally important evidence base to the more classic quantitative evidence base.
"As I look back on my time in this job, it will be impossible to separate the work that I've done in this role and the experience that I had during my time with CSaP.”
I've genuinely really enjoyed my time as a Policy Fellow, and the CSaP team has been so helpful and accommodating. I think one of the reasons I've been able to get as much out of it as I have, is that my meetings in Cambridge were spaced out over a long period of time so that I was really able to reflect on my earlier conversations with people and iterate my questions.
What I've learnt through the Fellowship is something I’d already suspected, which is that we (academics and policy makers) speak very different languages and operate at different time scales but I think the experience has made me better at asking questions. Policy professionals tend not to be experts, and so we tend to be deferential to academics who are experts in their fields. I had a lot of interactions with a lot of different academics and realised that not everybody in Cambridge even agrees with each other on some pretty fundamental issues. Having been exposed to the differences of opinion that exist within the academic community, I feel more confident to push back and challenge experts.