What to do when your research conflicts with government policy

Policy is rarely predictable, and it is certainly not always evidence-based. When a government changes, you may lose everything you were working towards, and have nothing to show for all your efforts in policy terms. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that one of the most common questions I’m asked when doing my Influencing Policy training is: what do you do when your research doesn't align with current government policy?

There's evidence to suggest that when your research is in line with prevailing government policies, it's much easier to get impact than when your research is misaligned with the party in power. Of course, this is not fair. But sadly, we are not all created equal when it comes to policy impact. Through no fault of our own, you can be doing great research and great policy engagement, but if you're misaligned, you're going to have a much harder time getting that research into policy.

There are a number of things you can do about this: wait for a change of minister or government; reframe your evidence for a different audience; or work with an intermediary to reach the right people. If none of those work, there are three more approaches I’ll cover in a follow-up post: testing your idea with another government, bypassing government altogether, and — as a last resort — campaigning publicly for change.

Wait for a change in government

If you have the luxury of time, you can wait until a new government comes along that's better aligned with the ideology behind our research, or one that fits the evidence more effectively. You can do this actively. It doesn't have to rely on a new government coming into power at all — if you're regularly in touch with civil service teams, sometimes all it takes is for a new minister to come into the department with a different set of priorities, and suddenly your research aligns with their interests, and you get that green light without having to wait for a change in government. It's always worth keeping an eye on the interests and priorities of new ministers as they take up their posts.

If the only option is to wait for a new government, you don't have to wait passively. You can work with opposition parties as they create their manifestos. Typically, it's members of the party who have access to the manifesto-making workshops, so it's worth looking across your academic networks to find out if there are members of that party you could work with to get those ideas into the manifesto (I’m surprised at how many of my colleagues are quietly members of political parties). As an independent expert, you can also contact the party directly to say you've got ideas that align with their thinking and would like to meet and pitch them. If you're working with a party that might credibly take power at the next election, a manifesto pledge should, in theory, form part of their programme for government.

Reframe the evidence

The second approach is to try to reframe what you're doing, to see if there are ways to make your work more palatable to those in power. This is a tricky thing to do well, and you have to be conscious of your own ethical red lines. At no point can this be about changing the evidence — but it's surprising what you can do to reframe existing evidence in ways that travel politically.

In my book The Researcher's Guide to Influencing Policy, I described working with a charity I volunteer for, the IUCN UK Peatland Programme. Based on research I'd been doing, I did an early version of what we now call a 3i analysis, working out whose interests intersected with my research, who had most influence and who stood to win or lose most in terms of the impacts that might arise from the work. Using this tool, I worked out that this charity was one of the most influential bodies working with UK governments on this issue. I worked with them to pitch paying for peatland restoration through carbon markets. The charity was concerned because damaged peatlands are among the UK's largest sources of greenhouse gases, and the government was telling us it didn't have sufficient public funding to fix the problem. The idea was to use carbon markets to plug that gap and start scaling restoration to fix our climate problem while creating benefits for wildlife.

We pitched this originally to a Labour government, to a department that had climate change in the title. They were working actively on nature conservation, so they were happy to listen and started working with us toward the policy structures necessary for high-integrity carbon markets that could restore nature and help fix the climate problem.

Before we'd completed that work, there was an election, and we got a Conservative-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and a Conservative minister who was a climate denier. He wasn't interested in working with us, and, according to him, climate change wasn't real.

So we reframed our work. At no point did we mislead anyone — we were very clear that we were a conservation charity that cares about climate change. But we pointed out that the mechanism we'd been working on was about securing public-private partnerships and bringing in private investment so the state doesn't have to foot the bill. As a conservative, he may not have been as interested in nature conservation or climate change as we were, but he was interested in the mechanism and how it might apply to other areas of policy. That got us as far as a White Paper.

Then there was a new election with a Conservative majority, and a new minister who this time was not a climate denier. He was vaguely interested in climate change and nature, but he had other more pressing concerns, and wanted to create his own legacy rather than fulfil his predecessor's. So the ideas in our White Paper went nowhere. But we were able to reframe our work again when we worked out he was supporting Brexit. In his constituency, he had lots of hill farmers, enjoyed walking in the hills, and liked sheep. So we explained again that we were a conservation charity working on climate change, and that whatever he thought of his predecessor's ideas, the mechanism we were developing could put more money in hill farmers' pockets than the EU could. We pointed out that this solved a problem for him as a farming minister, because the research suggested hill farmers were going to be hit harder than anyone else by Brexit. On that basis, he was happy to work with us, and we were now on the cusp of getting the policy change we needed.

However, there was a reshuffle, and we had a new minister who was not interested in anything we had to say. Even if we could have found a way of framing our work that would have interested him, he had a policy of not talking to conservationists, and was utterly uncontactable.

Work with an intermediary

At this point we resorted to working with someone who described himself as a public affairs consultant. The reality was he was a lobbyist; a hired gun who was willing to hire himself out at his half-price charity rate, and would introduce us to his rich and famous friends. He came into our office with a little black book — names of celebrities, members of the royal family, rich businessmen, Lords and Ladies (I remember seeing Benedict Cumberbatch’s name and phone number as he flicked through the book). He came up with a plan to host a series of fancy dinners in large country houses on peatland estates, each hosted by a different Conservative Lord who was his friend. I didn't have to go to these, but the head of policy from our charity went and pitched our idea to his friends. They liked what he had to say, because it could help them fix damaged peat bogs on their estates and make them money from carbon markets.

On the third and final of these dinners, it just so happened that the minister was visiting for a shooting party. He came to dinner, and his Lords and friends pitched our idea to him, and on that basis, he thought it was a jolly good idea.

I would describe this as a story of legitimate policy influence, because at no point did we change the evidence, and at no point did we hide who we were or what we were trying to achieve. But we reframed it effectively enough to make it of interest to successive governments. And then when our networks failed us, we worked with an intermediary who could get our framing of the work to the right person at the right time. You may see this as a form of manipulation. But manipulation requires this to be something in the personal interest, whereas we were working in the public interest. Manipulation is deceitful; it hides things and gets people to do things against their will, against their interests, often without them realising. But you have to decide what you're comfortable doing. You may not be comfortable reframing to the extent that we did, or in the ways you'd have to, based on your evidence — but it's worth thinking about.

I share this story because it is probably the most extreme example of an intermediary I have used. But I work with intermediaries on a regular basis, and most of them are much more palatable. Many are other academics who have better connections than me or are more trusted by the right people. Sometimes, it is a civil servant who has been in the department long enough to know all the key people in their department and agencies, and the bodies they work closely with, and how to reach each of them most effectively. In other cases, it is someone in an NGO, but for you it might be a union representative, or a representative of a professional body. One of the most powerful uses of a 3i analysis is to identify organisations and people like this, who can open doors for you to their networks.

These first three approaches — waiting actively, reframing your evidence, and working with intermediaries — are the ones I reach for first when research and policy are out of step. They are all, in different ways, about finding a route to the right person at the right time, without compromising what the evidence says. Sometimes they are enough. Sometimes the door remains closed regardless. In a follow-up post, I’ll cover three more approaches for when that happens: working with another government, bypassing government altogether, and — as a last resort — campaigning.

Key takeaways

• Misalignment with the government of the day makes policy impact harder, through no fault of the researcher or the quality of the evidence.
• Waiting for change can be done actively, by tracking the priorities of incoming ministers and feeding ideas into opposition manifestos through party networks.
• Reframing means presenting the same evidence in terms that match the audience's priorities, never altering the evidence itself.
• The same policy idea can survive successive governments if it is repeatedly reframed around what each new minister actually cares about.
• Intermediaries, from fellow academics to civil servants, NGOs or professional bodies, can carry your framing to the right person when your own networks cannot.
• A 3i analysis is a practical way to identify which intermediaries hold the interests, influence and stake to open those doors.