bridging research and policy: a uk perspective

Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 17, 747–757 (2005)

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jid.1237

BRIDGING RESEARCH AND POLICY:A UK PERSPECTIVE

MATTHEW TAYLOR*

Former Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and now Head of Policy Planning

in the Prime Minister’s team in Downing Street, UK

1 INTRODUCTION

A huge opportunity exists for the development agenda in the coming period because of the

European Union (EU) Presidency, the G8, and what will be an unprecedented popular

mobilization around issues to do with Africa and the broader development agenda. From

the perspective of someone who works less at the boundary between research and policy

and more at the boundary between policy and political strategy, the political salience of the

development agenda creates enormous opportunities for this debate to move to the

absolute centre of public concern, so it is a vital and opportune moment.

There is no shortage of tragic failures amongst those seeking to turn ideas and research

into action. An old example is the slogan of the Association of University Teachers, who,

so the story goes, in the late 1970s decided to take their first strike action and marched

down Whitehall holding placards in the air bearing the well-researched and pithy—not to

mention incomprehensible—campaign statement: ‘Rectify the Anomaly’. A more current

example was the recent referendum on regional devolution in the North East, which

rejected a regional assembly. The yes campaign had a set of arguments around the need to

bring together the regeneration budget with those for transport and housing, and a set of

arguments around the importance of democratic accountability and public engagement.

The no campaign had a 15-foot inflatable white elephant.

Another example of heroic failure was the Guardian’s campaign to mobilize the voters

of Clark County in the United States (US) to vote for the Democratic candidate in the US

Presidential election. This resulted in Clark County having one of the biggest swings to the

Republicans in the country—and amongst those people who switched their support from

Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

*Correspondence to: M. Taylor, C/O Laura McCaig, 10 Downing Street, London, SW1A 2AA, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

the Democrats to the Republicans, the second most often cited reason was irritation with

the Guardian’s campaign.

So—research does not always succeed in influencing policy. But can we do better?

I think we can. And I propose five rules.

1.1 The first rule: win the argument about what the problem is before trying to win

the argument about what the solution is

The first rule is to win the argument about what the problem is before trying to win the

argument about what the solution is. Was it Lincoln who once said that if he had eight

hours to chop down a tree, he would spend six hours sharpening his axe? The equivalent of

that in policy terms is to win the argument about what the nature of the problem is.

Traditionally, radicals on the right have been much better at this than those on the left.

They won the argument about the problem being ‘government’, for example, and that was

an important precursor to the changes in the way that they talked about public manage-

ment. They won the argument about the existence of an underclass, and that was a

precursor to a set of ideas around welfare reform.

Here are two examples of where this rule has gone right and gone wrong recently for

this government. In relation to public service reform, the government won an argument

where they said people have changed, people’s demands have changed, their expectations

have risen and that therefore public services have to be reformed so that they can meet the

expectations and the demands of modern people. Note that this was much more an

argument about whether the diagnosis of the problem was correct than it was about what

the solutions were.

As a counter-example, take the recent argument about gambling. The government spent

years discussing its policy on gambling and evolving it, but the problem is that the public

didn’t understand the nature of the problems—for example, the huge explosion of

unregulated Internet gambling. So the question for government was not: ‘Let’s make up

a policy on gambling because we’ve got nothing better to do’; it was, rather: ‘We face a

huge challenge of offshore internet gambling, how do we deal with this? Do we stand back

and let it happen, or do we try to regulate gambling and ensure that if gambling is going to

take place it benefits the UK economy and not simply the economy of Nevada?’ But the

problem was never understood by the public, and when the solution came forward people

felt it came from nowhere. It was then very easy for the opponents of the policy to

caricature the government’s motives.

1.2 The second rule: the vital importance of political context

In a sense this point is so obvious that it should not need to be made, but it is always

necessary to emphasize the need to frame research in relation to what might be called the

political zeitgeist—in other words, in relation to those issues that are at the front of

people’s minds. This is not about perverting the research. It is, rather, about understanding

the way in which the door can be opened to politicians and public interest.

As a concrete example of this, the government has been doing a great deal of

thinking about neighbourhood governance, about devolving power right down to the

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Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 17, 747–757 (2005)

neighbourhood level. As it happens, some of the arguments derive from research in

international development, but be that as it may, there are some very important and very

big ideas about how to lower the boundaries between state and civic action, and about how

to empower people and renew democracy.

However, the way in which this policy is now proceeding is to focus primarily on

the single issue of neighbourhood safety. Why? Because that is where the public is.

Thus, the debate about neighbourhood government is being opened up through the

question of enhancing policing presence in neighbourhoods, and how neighbourhoods

themselves can require the police to be more accountable to the neighbourhood

organizations, and how neighbourhood groups can start to make their own contribu-

tions through their own resources and their own efforts to tackle the issue of community

safety.

1.3 The third rule: balance persistence and opportunism

The third rule is to win the argument for a particular policy by deploying exactly the right

combination of persistence and opportunism. Another way of putting this is to avoid two

mistakes. The first mistake, which is very typical of think tanks, is to complete a piece of

research, place it in the newspapers, see that people are excited about it—and then wander

off, because the research funding runs out or the researcher loses interest. So the idea,

having got half-way through the door, never gets pushed any further. And then it falls

away. Successful campaigns do not follow this path. For example, the campaign run by

Rodney Bickerstaff and the Trade Unions for a minimum wage succeeded because they

pressed on—year on year on year on year.

However, the other mistake is to keep making the argument in exactly the same terms

over a long period of time. Researchers need the opportunism to recognize that arguments

can be adapted to take advantage of the political zeitgeist. This raises questions about the

way in which researchers can organise themselves, and be supported by research bodies, to

put as much effort into continuing to drive behind the research they have already

developed as they do in developing new research.

1.4 The fourth rule: focus on application

The fourth point is that simply getting good research translated into a policy adopted is,

at best, only a third of the way towards getting good research turned into actual action on

the ground.

After the first step, policy may face a barrier when people start to think about the

practical application. If the researcher is not there on the scene to push it over that barrier,

then it falls.

And then, finally, in the process of an idea being turned into action, it may turn from a

silk purse into a sow’s ear. A think tank researcher once remarked that after years of

research and lobbying, he finally got an idea accepted by civil servants, only to see a year

later that idea emerge in policy advice in a way which he would have actively campaigned

against, had it not been for the fact that it was being briefed that he was the author of the

policy.

A UK Perspective 749


In short, it is absolutely vital to understand the process. And the process, in this

case, is not just the process of getting the idea in, and not just the process of the

policy documents being written. We need, in effect, an understanding of what happens

after that: the process of the idea and documents going to the politicians, the process

of how it turns into policy advice, and then the process by which it goes from

policy advice at the centre and out to those people who need to implement it at street

level.

1.5 The fifth rule: always be strategic

There are many definitions of strategy given by overpaid management gurus, but in the

end there is one which is the simplest and best; the idea of two men out walking in the

woods and suddenly they hear the sound of a grizzly bear pounding towards them. One of

the men starts to panic while the other calmly takes off his rucksack and puts on some

running shoes. His friend says to him: ‘What are you doing? You’ll never ever outrun that

bear!’—‘No,’ he says, ‘but I will outrun you.’

So always be strategic. Policy-making is a competitive business. Researchers will have

opponents who disagree with their analysis. They are a problem. There will be people who

fundamentally oppose the researcher’s objective. They are a bigger problem. And then

there will be people who designed the previous policy that current research is trying to

change. They are the biggest problem of all.

There are people who have an unbelievable capacity to take any policy framework and

adapt it so that they can carry on doing the same things that they have always done before.

The researcher’s strategy needs to differentiate clearly between those people who can be

persuaded, those people who cannot be persuaded, those people with whom it is possible

to compromise and deal with, and, sometimes, those people who need to be isolated and

simply defeated, because they are going to stand up against change.

2 CONCLUSION

Now none of these comments, none of this rather brutal and practical account of how

ideas are translated into action, mean that the quality of research is not important. Most

of the time, the material that reaches policy-makers simply does not pass the basic tests

of robust policy advice. Too much research advocates expenditure without any proper

cost-benefit assessment, fails to address wider system effects and the possibility of

perverse outcomes, or is based on a rather shallow and unrealistic account of public

attitudes and behaviour. Bad research of this kind does not deserve any better than to

fall by the wayside.

3 DISCUSSION

3.1 Saleem Huq (Climate Change Programme, International Institute for Environment

and Development, London, UK )

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I’d like to put to Matthew how he would actually put into practice what he has just

recommended here with respect to a major problem, which is both a development problem

and an environment problem, namely how to persuade the US to come back into the global

climate change arena. The Prime Minister has made this a major issue, but the Bush

administration is already indicating that it is going to fight this tooth and nail. How is the

Prime Minister going to persuade the US to come back?

3.2 Matthew Taylor

As a government employee I’m not going to get into the business of making an

intervention which is beyond my pay grade. Let me make two very different points,

and they are quite harsh points—at least the first one.

First, I think it is still the case that too many environmentalists think that an argument

isn’t a proper argument unless it’s about how much we’ve all got to sacrifice in order to

make advances in relation to climate change. There is almost a glorying in saying ‘you

can’t go on as you are and we’re all going to have to transform our lives if we’re going to

survive’. Now I don’t underestimate the importance of climate change at all, I think it’s a

huge issue and it’s an issue the Prime Minister takes very seriously. But we shouldn’t focus

only on this one side of the issue; we need to focus just as much on the possibilities of

being able to tackle climate change through means which don’t actually involve people

having to give up things that matter to them.

Second, I don’t underestimate how difficult the argument is going to be. You will not be

surprised to hear me say that the first and essential step is to try and win a consensus on the

science—and that is what the Prime Minister said the priority is in G8. He has not set

unrealistic targets. If we can try to get consensus on the science, and I think that consensus

is growing, including in the US, then that is the vital first step. It goes back to my point at

the beginning about winning on the definition of the problem.

3.3 N.C. Saxena

Well, in fact it is very true that for climate change a number of sacrifices have to be made

by the US and the developed world—and it does appear that they are not willing to make

those sacrifices. In fact, I would even say that at the Johannesburg Conference, the shift

from environment to poverty was very much influenced by the view that lifestyles had to

change: because the developed world did not want to be questioned on the lifestyle issue,

they shifted the focus to poverty, which means that the guilty party is the developing

world. And yet they are not reducing poverty. So I would say that I certainly agree with

Dr Huq, in that this is an arena where the developed world really have to look at

themselves very carefully.

3.4 Desmond McNeill (University of Oslo, Norway )

I have a comment to Matthew Taylor about the distortion of ideas between policy and

action. I’ve done my work on the distortion between research and policy but there are



some interesting parallels. Often people say ‘yes I agree’, but yet they are perverting subtly

what you are saying—and sometimes not too subtly either, as in the example you gave.

Sometimes that is acceptable if you want people to agree with you, because you need to

achieve agreement with the majority. On the other hand, if that’s at the expense of the

analytical content or the political content or the idea, then it’s totally lost, and that’s a

complicated game to play.

‘Sustainable development’ is a concrete example. It is often presented as the main

answer to a problem, but in itself it isn’t a solution. People think that when they have

named something, they have the solution, but in fact there are so many different

interpretations as to what sustainable development means that it ceases to become a

solution; it simply becomes a name that people can agree on without actually dealing with

the central issues.

As I say, I’ve studied the dynamic between research and policy, but does something

similar happen between policy and action? Do you have a sort of trade-off between getting

agreement at the expense of losing what it is you are actually saying?

3.5 Matthew Taylor

I agree absolutely. I think the first point is that you have to see the process as continuous.

The process of turning things from identification of the problem, the undertaking of the

research, the identification of the solutions, turning that into policy—that is a continuous

process, which involves engagement at every level. In a sense, it is a bit like bringing up a

child: at times there are periods of greater intensity, but if you are a parent you always want

to be engaged in the development of your children. And they may have their moments of

crisis, it is an unpredictable thing, and you need to be engaged throughout if you are going

to achieve successful guardianship.

3.6 Piush Antony (India Co-ordinator, Young Lives Project, Save the Children, UK )

My question is to Mr Saxena. I think those good progressive measures that came up in the

last decade bypassed the major policy-making institutions. They did not come through

legislature, but through special ordinances. Bureaucracy plays a very crucial role

especially at the state level. For example, when you said that nutrition programme

researchers had been highlighting early child care development as important, I see that

the integrated child development programme is not catering for that age group. And there

is no mechanism through which to reach out to the planning commission or to the ICVS

scheme, because there is no bureaucratic will. I would like to hear your comments on this,

since you have been part of the bureaucracy for a long time and you are still a part of the

planning commission.

3.7 N.C. Saxena

Well, let me say that in my career as a civil servant I always had very good relations with

my ministers. Someone asked me once how that had come about, and I said that we have a

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very good distribution of work: I look after the policy and he looks after the staff. Now

actually according to our constitution it is the other way round—I should have been

looking after implementation and personnel issues, and ministers should have been

looking after the policy. But it so happens that in India things are topsy-turvy, so you

find that the civil servants have been given the task of initiating policy and taking it

through, whereas most politicians are totally indifferent to what the policy is. They are

busy in patronage, they are busy in issues of a totally sectarian nature, etc. Now this is not a

very viable model, because as I said the centralist structure for bureaucrats is not in favour

of them making good policy either. It requires a professional civil servant who can work

out the detail, and it could also require a politician to support that and to say: ‘okay, we will

really support you and we will not transfer you’.

3.8 Louise Shaxon (Science Strategy Team, UK Department of the Environment,

Farming and Rural Affairs, UK )

I’m a consultant at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)

and I’m running something called the Evidence Based Policy Making Project. The work

that we’ve been doing is to ask policy-makers what sort of relationship they want from

researchers. They say that researchers are very good at producing commissioned

research of high quality; there are lots of processes in place for commissioning good

research. But what researchers are less good at—and I’m speaking about the UK

context now—is forming and carrying on a questioning relationship that helps policy-

makers to lift their eyes from their desks, because policy-makers are under the most

heinous time pressures, constantly dealing with high pressure on short term issues.

Policy-makers want quick and concise syntheses on current knowledge. But, beyond

that, they also want to develop a relationship where they can get researchers to help

them focus on what is going on, and what is deliverable. Researchers need to help

policy-makers to scope and frame the issue, and to do so through a very deeply

questioning relationship, but they also need to help them interpret the results, so that

they can take it forward.

3.9 Matthew Taylor

I agree completely with that very important point about the continuous relationship.

The image of the policy-maker/researcher relationship that comes into my mind is that

too often the policy-maker feels like someone who isn’t very fit being passed by someone

who is jogging very fast. It leaves you feeling sort of inadequate. You feel you ought to be

doing what the researcher is doing, but you don’t know how to do it, and so you end up

feeling resentful. The notion that you gave me was actually that of a personal trainer

model: the researcher needs to be there with the policy-maker on a continuous basis, in

order to keep them fit, keep them focused, keep them understanding the way the thing is

developing. And I think that is absolutely the right model because, as you say, if there is a

disengagement, the pace of change is so great that it is very hard to re-engage at exactly the

right moment unless you’re already there. So that notion of a continuous relationship is

absolutely right, I think.



The other thing I wanted to say is that I agree that policy-makers are not homogenous.

At IPPR, most of the research that we used was academic research. But we didn’t do any

academic research ourselves, what we did was to think about its application. The last thing

I think we should be doing is to drag in brilliant academics who want to sit in a room

having brilliant thoughts and doing brilliant research and force them to become spin

doctors. The point, as in so many other areas, is that it’s more important to look at and to

use the links between different disciplines and different roles, rather than to change those

roles and disciplines themselves. It is the bridge—and of course this is the title of the

conference—it is the bridge that’s the crucial thing.

3.10 Liz Dowler (University of Warwick, UK )

I’m now a full time academic, so I fully agree with the last two comments. Of course

people who do academic research are not homogeneous either. One of the realities

that many academics in universities now have to face in Britain, and I’m sure there

are equivalent things elsewhere, is that they are in competition for grants because of

the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). In many respects this restricts the kind

of research you can do and the kinds of outputs which are valued. I wanted the speakers

and maybe others to comment on what I have heard discussed privately, namely the

damaging effect of the RAE on the possibilities of pursuing the kind of policy engaged

role you have just described, which is very attractive but which frankly is completely

unrewarded in the system in which we currently work and which pays our salary.

3.11 Diane Stone (Central European University)

My comments follow on very much from the last speaker. The presentations focused on

research going into policy, almost as if the bridge was a one-way route. I’m wondering if

perhaps you could elaborate on the way in which governments and also international

organisations commission research. They are not passive in this process, but are proactive

in commissioning certain kinds of research that they need to help them. This also plays an

important role, not necessarily in determining the research process, but in determining

what kind of research gets funding.

A second comment I wanted to make is that we are missing an important point here

by focusing on the immediate products of research, rather than also on the long-term

research capacity that is actually embedded in human capital. In a way Matthew is a

good example of this, in the way that you have gone from a university context to a think

tank and now to government. So the absorptive capacity of government for research,

and for strategically demanding research, is embedded in the people who actually work

in government. That is the long-term need which must be thought about in terms of how

we educate people for public service and public action.

3.12 David Jackson (Independent development consultant )

I wanted to pick up that point that N.C. Saxena made about India and how the ministers

look after the people and the top civil servants look after the policy. A lot of my work is

754 M. Taylor


about trying to influence policy in developing countries, and I think there is a contrast

between influencing policy in countries like the UK, which Matthew spoke a lot about, and

influencing policy in developing countries. I think a lot depends on the type of state that is

in place. In many developing countries there is little interest by politicians in policy,

whereas as Matthew points out, here in the UK politicians are always trying to surround

themselves with policy.

3.13 Matthew Taylor

I agree with those three comments completely. I know what David says is convincing,

although I wouldn’t claim to have expertise myself. In relation to Liz’s point about

the greater emphasis and status put on academic as against applied research, and

the difficulty for academics in doing more applied research, I think is absolutely

right. I think that there is a great emphasis now on the application of scientific research

in relation to innovation and wealth creation. The notion of valuing application is

something that we should extend, and we’ve made an inroad through the notion of

university and industrial links—which have been very much focused on technology.

I think we need to widen that to social science as well.

The point about embedding research capacity in people is absolutely right. It suggests

that one should not just think about how to influence the current generation of politicians,

but also about how one creates another generation of politicians who have a commitment

to research and policy rigour embedded in them.

Your point about how government commissions research is also very well made.

I am doing some work around the Department of Trade and Industry’s five year

plan, and one of the issues we will be exploring, especially in the context of techno-

logy, is how we can improve the quality of government research and development

(R&D).

3.14 Judith Appleton (Independent consultant on food poverty and food insecurity )

My comments are to do with the relevance of some of our research in relation to

working with developing countries. Now that we have another Bush administration,

the relevance of our experience with how Iraq has been handled becomes even

more important. I feel that in situations like this, we have in fact very little use for

Matthew’s points number one (win the argument about the problem) and indeed

number four as well (focus on application). My own experience of Iraq, trying to

work in the coalition provisional authority headed by Paul Bremmer, was that they

were not at all interested in research, regarding my case, on food policy. Policy came

out of an ideological viewpoint for them, and this was not susceptible to arguments

on the basis of research or common sense or anything else. The fact that there was

80 per cent unemployment and that people had no means of buying any food, and

much less in that system, was irrelevant. We could not agree on the problem, and

we could not agree on any relevant research or on what was important. What

will always be important in that kind of situation is Matthew’s point number five:

be strategic. The only way that we managed to maintain the food rations until



something else was put in its place, was first of all by going to the high command, and

pointing out to the military that if the ration was disbanded then people would be

hungry and angry.

3.15 Hand Peter Ulrich (Independent development consultant )

In the discussion this morning we learnt about the complexities of implementing practical

policy. I have a request, following on from this. We need to teach this in our university

courses.

3.16 N.C. Saxena

I would like to reply to one or two issues that have been raised. One is that of course the

government’s job is to get research done. Let me illustrate by saying that research has two

different sides. The first is to generate data. This is done in a scientific way: how many

poor are there, how many unemployed, how many are speaking this language or that

language, etc. Censuses and various other surveys are done on a scientific basis—and in

India statistics have a lot of credibility.

However, when it comes to interpretation, which is the other side of research, then there

are many things that should be happening, but which are not. First of all, there may not

be agreement even amongst researchers as to what the real reasons are for failure on the

policy front. Secondly, government doesn’t like negative information to be passed on,

which brings some pressure to bear on government working groups who are supposed to

advise government on various policy issues. The third point, in relation to India, is that

donors have to address their decisions to the civil servants—that is, to the policy-makers

who are civil servants—because, as I said, it is a fact that the real policy-makers, the

politicians, have very little understanding or knowledge of policy issues.

Lastly, I would say that in India, because of the open press and open democracy and

freedom of expression, policy-making is highly susceptible to what comes out in the press.

The interests of the poorest and of the tribal community are not being looked after in this

regard. No one will say how people are being displaced. You will hardly find any articles

on this issue in the newspapers. In the press, you will find the powerful lobbies that are able

to attract the attention of the policy-makers, while the unorganized masses, or the poor

living in remote areas, are ignored.

3.17 Simon Maxwell (Director, ODI )

We are on a journey in this area, all of us. Many of us in this room are researchers by

history and by orientation, but we also want to see something happen, and we have to think

very hard about how that’s going to take place. There are a number of things that

researchers need to do differently. The first, and actually the hardest of all, is to be clear

about what it is that we want to happen. So many research papers are either very micro or

756 M. Taylor


have so many different options or so many different problems, that we simply find

ourselves unable to engage in a conversation with policy-makers. And, as all our work has

shown, if you want to influence policy-makers then you need to be able to diagnose the

problem, give them some options that help them, and then take the solutions forward. We

need to be good story tellers. And in fact we have had some very, very good stories today.

Thank you all.



bridging research and policy: a uk perspective

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