Areas of research interest: joining the dots between government and research at last?

Introduction: what are areas of research interest?

Although governments, funders and researchers often share a desire for more evidence to support social change, there are significant organisational and procedural barriers in the way. One often-mentioned barrier to evidence use in policy is a lack of policy relevant research (Armstrong et al., 2006; Oliver et al., 2014; Cairney, 2016; Wye et al., 2019). One way of addressing this barrier is to make it easier for researchers to know about policymakers’ research priorities. In the UK, government departments identify priority research gaps called Areas of Research Interest (ARIs). The Nurse Review into the UK Research Councils (Nurse, 2015) identified a strategic need across government departments to “maintain[] ‘statements of need’, in terms of the most important research questions confronting the Departments” (p.3, Nurse, 2015). By enabling other government departments, funders, and researchers, ARIs were intended to enable policymakers to access relevant evidence and expertise more easily. A similar initiative has been proposed in the US, called the Government Learning Agendas¹, where all departments and arms-length bodies are required by the Evidence Act (2019) to publish their knowledge needs.

Many policy and practice organisations including government departments of course communicated their evidence needs before these initiatives (e.g. in Defra’s evidence plan from 2006). However, the ARIs are the first time that every department has been required to publish these publicly, update them annually, and invest resources into their production and use; in effect, 'systematising and embedding the articulation of research interests as part of the fabric of policy making.

The role of our team

In the UK, the Government Office for Science (GOS) supports the Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA), and holds a cross-government remit to support science capability across departments. It relies on 'soft power' networking and influencing rather than mandating. It also holds the policy for Areas of Research Interest. As part of this remit, Giulia Cuccato led a team of civil servants in the Government Office for Science (GOS) to develop guidance for departments in developing their ARIs, and supporting and tracking their ARI-related activities. Alongside this work, Kathryn Oliver and Annette Boaz have been embedded in GOS to explore and support better production of ARIs, and more effective engagement with them by funders, researchers and intermediaries. We have been involved in supporting the development of ARIs across the UK government, in helping departments use ARIs to access relevant evidence and expertise, and in researching how ARIs could be optimised to support the research-policy system.

Our reflections here are based on our work since 2018 (GC) and 2019 (KO and AB) which has involved working closely with analyst and policy teams in departments across government, and with intermediaries such as the University Policy Engagement Network (UPEN), the National Academies, the What Works Network, and individual universities and researchers, in a practical knowledge mobilisation programme. We draw on these experiences to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of ARIs, and our recommendations to improve their effectiveness as a systems-level intervention.

Policy outcomes and implications

The ARIs have great potential to enable funders, government, research organisations, researchers, and intermediaries to work together in a more effective way. We have observed that merely producing ARIs is not a sufficient intervention; instead, it requires skilled mobilisation work by people within all these organisations to be able to optimise their production and use. Below, we describe how ARIs are produced, what ARI-related engagement occurs, and how they function as a systems level intervention.

Weaknesses of the ARIs: systems challenges

Not everything can be or is articulated as an ARI: ARIs are not able to articulate the totality of departmental research needs. For some departments, this is due to political or operational sensitivity, and for others, they prefer to only publish ARIs on topics where they are currently seeking external input. It would be a mistake, therefore, to think of ARIs as a complete and exhaustive list of the topics on which government is seeking input.

ARIs are not research questions: Academics frequently describe ARIs as poorly written research questions. An alternative, more useful phrase might be “research needs”, which helps to give the impression that there is a process attached to them, that they are valued, and broader than research questions. They are more usefully thought of as topics for conversation.

ARIs are difficult to access and analyse: By 2018, most departments had published at least one version of their ARIs, which then sat on the government website in pdf or html formats. There is as yet no easy way to search for ARIs by topic, department or year, which makes it difficult for researchers to identify relevant topics or potential collaborators This also means that departments are not easily able to identify shared cross departmental areas of interest.

Finding relevant evidence and expertise takes time and work: While some departments had resources dedicated to engagement around the ARIs, others did not. While relevant research often exists (as bodies of primary research, in research and practice communities, or in ongoing funding investments), this knowledge is often inaccessible, being behind paywalls or requiring time and skill to find and absorb.

Actionable recommendations

Areas of Research Interest are a helpful intervention, as a cog in the system which may help us make and use evidence more effectively to inform policy. They are a positive development, without being a silver bullet solution to the knotty problem of evidence production and use. However, much could be done to optimise their production and use.

Funders need to support knowledge exchange and evidence synthesis as well as primary research relevant to these areas. At present, funders are often not able to easily access their portfolios of existing investments, which means it is difficult for them to help departments access ARI-relevant existing research or relevant experts. Funders do not appear to be able to track use of ARIs in proposals, and it is not clear how they shape future investments. Finally, funders do not appear to being using ARIs as a basis to identify shared interests) and where they do fund knowledge exchange activities, they do so in an uncoordinated and non-strategic way. Hardly any funders invest in research about evidence production and use, which would produce empirical evidence to guide these activities.

Intermediaries: Intermediaries (such as the National Academies, selected What Works Centres such as the Wales Centre for Public Policy) often do have both skilled and resourced individuals who work across academic-policy boundaries. Further investment in brokers and intermediaries would be an effective way to strengthen research-policy engagement. Where there is significant staff turnover in government (as civil servants move roles) Intermediaries can become the repository for organisational memory and could advise departments on their own policy and research engagement history. However, this work is often essentially unpaid, and there is no easy way for the skills and careers of knowledge mobilisers in these organisations to be nurtured. Intermediaries occupy a really important place in the academic policy landscape, enabling them to convene and facilitate cross-field and interdisciplinary discussions. We found that Intermediaries were really valued, able to access experts, bring in diverse voices and knowledge types. However, the brokering organisations we saw (National Academies, What Works Networks, UPEN) did not represent all academics and communities.

Researchers and universities need to incentivise effective policy engagement. individual researchers often lack structures to help them understand policy need, so despite the existence of the ARIs, they struggle to address policy agendas. They are not well-trained or incentivised to engage well, and where they do, they tend to actively push experts and expertise out via marketing and PR approaches, rather than thinking about the overall science system. This leads to competition between them for officials’ time, which is inefficient and drives inequity and a lack of diversity in the science advisory system. Training is often about increasing volume and impact of individual researchers or projects. We observed that almost all the university-led projects and engagement activities sought to push university agendas (e.g. institutional profile) or researcher agendas (e.g. individual careers, or importance of particular pieces of evidence). This is not helpful for policy colleagues, who then have to analyse where engagement is most useful and least costly. There is also a growing infrastructure to support knowledge mobilisation within universities, and interestingly across them too. The University Policy Engagement Network is an opportunity to collaborate on and share knowledge exchange training, best practice, and a chance to offer government a more diverse set of experts to draw on.

Government departments: need to be clear what is being asked and offered for each ARI. Their current resources and histories of engagement shape their ARI planning, but a broader range of engagement mechanisms would make academic-policy engagement more efficient and effective. Departments may benefit from more support to develop and implement engagement plans effectively, minimising duplication and maximising value for money. There is also a need to track the use of ARIs to understand how they are used and demonstrate to departmental colleagues the value of investing time in ARI development and academic engagement.

All groups would benefit from a more robust evidence base about how to engage most effectively There is considerable scope to improve the process of selecting appropriate next steps, and to expand the range of research-policy engagement mechanisms used. In general, seeking to complement existing structures and processes is most efficient and leads to least disruption.

Making ARs discoverable: in their current form (as published ARIs documents from each government department) they can be hard to search and access (especially for cross departmental issues). Making the ARIs accessible would enable researchers and funders to identify trends, themes and topics to inform their future and present work. Government officials would be able to discover areas of shared interest with other departmental colleagues and work on shared priorities together. This would be a great public resource.

Understanding the impact of ARIs: The impacts we identified from our ARI-related knowledge mobilisation are not a comprehensive overview of how they are shaping research, engagement and investment activities. It would be useful to have a more exhaustive exploration of who is using ARIs, how, and for what purpose. As we note above, it is unlikely that ARIs will ever be able to capture all governmental research needs or engagement activities. For example, they may be more useful at capturing topics which could inform policy over the medium to long-term than for short term problems.

Shared problem-framing and priority-setting: ARIs offer an opportunity for government to think and articulate its strategic aims. To operationalise these aims takes organisational capability which needs to be built over time, both within government and in its external partners. This might be achieved by a cross-government initiative or department taking responsibility for identifying areas of shared interest, a process for prioritisation, and/or a place to optimise engagement between academia and government.

Conclusions

The ARIs are a useful step forward to a more research-informed policy culture. We have highlighted some of the work which is needed to make ARIs useful, and identified points within the system where intervention and support would be beneficial. To make this happen, investment and resource will be required. Overall, these ARIs are an interesting model for other governments wanting to improve research production for and use in policy.

Author contribution

All authors developed the ideas for the paper and approved the final manuscript.