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Research conducted by John Turnpenny shaped the recommendations of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC). In 2010, the EAC addressed the need to embed sustainable development across government policy-making. This followed the closure of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) and the end of funding for the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC). The EAC determined to change how it engaged with experts, while reaffirming and expanding its role in the overall scrutiny of government sustainability policy. Turnpenny's findings formed the basis of two of the thirteen headline recommendations in the EAC's 2011 report Embedding Sustainable Development Across Government. In addition his suggestions helped influence significant changes in the way that the EAC operates, and contributed to its wider impact among other policy actors.
University of Glasgow research into public sector governance has influenced planning and investment in major transport and infrastructure projects. Transport Scotland's Strategic Transport Projects Review was the first nationwide, multi-modal, evidence based review of Scotland's transport system; as a member of the Board, Professor Iain Docherty contributed to its recommendations, adopted by the Scottish Government in December 2008. His research also shaped the Commission for Integrated Transport's negotiations with the Westminster Government on the White Paper which underpinned the Planning Bill 2008 and subsequent Planning Act 2009; informed the Cabinet Office's 2009 Urban Transport strategy and recommendations; and influenced 2012 investment planning discussions by Edinburgh City Council.
Professor Michael Keating has worked on various aspects of public policy-making in Scotland and abroad, supported primarily by the ESRC and Leverhulme Trust. Impact has taken the form of a series of collaborative academic-practitioner engagements, involving civil servants, politicians, and civil society actors. These events have focused on establishing a common vocabulary and core concepts, while exploring difficult issues in public policy and facilitating mutual learning between academics and practitioners. Insights from these encounters have been institutionalised in the Scottish Policy Innovation Forum, as well as ongoing seminars, public lectures, innovative training courses for civil servants, and informal discussions.
University of Glasgow research, undertaken in collaboration with the Universities of Exeter and Oxford, directly influenced the Government decision to create the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The Conservative Party cited the research as part of the rationale for the creation of such a fiscal body in its policy paper in 2008; the research was subsequently presented to the Strategy Unit of the Cabinet Office, No.'s 10 and 11 Downing Street and the Institute of Government throughout 2008 and 2009. The proposal was implemented by the coalition government in 2010, with the research team then using the findings to advise a Treasury Select Committee as well as the Bank of England on the appropriate remit, expectations and functions of the newly-created OBR.
The modern and contemporary British historians in the School of History at Queen Mary have a reputation for rigorous, yet relevant and engaged scholarship which has bearing on contemporary policies. Three historians — Peter Catterall (01 Sep. 1992-31 August 2012), Martyn Frampton (01 Sep. 2009-) and Tristram Hunt (30 Jun. 2003-) — have followed the influence of Peter Hennessy and the School of History's Research Strategy to make high profile and high value interventions in shaping public policy debates that surround the making of various policies, including contributing directly to the policy-making process in Whitehall. As a result, Queen Mary historians are recognised as reliable and expert interlocutors on counter-terrorism (Frampton), democracy and heritage (Catterall), and policy related to the cities and the countryside (Hunt).
The impact being described in this case study relates to the influence of Professor Martin Gainsborough's research on the international donor community's thinking behind and design of governance programmes in Vietnam and on understandings of these issues in news media coverage. Donors, in particular the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Australian government aid agency AusAid, and the Irish government aid agency Irish Aid acknowledge that Gainsborough's research has been a major influence on their understanding of Vietnamese politics which in turn has informed how they have designed their policy interventions during 2008-13. The research has resulted in greater reliance by donors on Vietnamese government systems, new risk mitigation measures and moves to `mainstream' governance across a range of aid programmes. The impact of Gainsborough's research has also reached beyond Vietnam by informing the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators.
In the last decade, sport has earned unprecedented recognition in international policy circles as a tool to support international development. Nonetheless, many have challenged this `new social movement' (Kidd, 2008), concerned by its uncritical application of Global North models of sport to Global South contexts. Addressing these concerns, Brunel researchers and collaborators have drawn on the field of international development studies to investigate how principles of local ownership and partnership can be applied to sport. Since 2010, empirical studies and critical conceptual analyses have contributed to this. Specifically through building organisational capacity at local level, supporting partnership between funders and recipient organisations, and developing national as well as international policy guidance to ensure community level experiences and perspectives are represented in sport for development policy and strategies.
In early 2013, a policy review across the DfE created five new `policy tests' which govern policymaking and which asked civil servants to include historical perspectives and sources in how they frame and evaluate policy making. The five tests were summarised in the October 2013 report of the Policy Profession Board, Twelve Actions to Professionalise Policy Making, and are currently recommended as good practice for all departments. Their development was informed by the experience of working with Prof. Pat Thane and the History and Policy unit at King's. Following the publication of Thane's Happy Families? History and Family Policy in 2010, History and Policy was invited by the Director of Children's Services and Departmental Strategy Directorate at the Department for Education to lead a series of history seminars designed to provide DfE civil servants with a deeper knowledge of up-to-date historical research relevant to their policy areas. This case study documents the direct impact of Happy Families in informing the work of the DfE and on the thinking of NGOs including the national childcare charity, the Daycare Trust. At the same time, it shows how Happy Families has contributed to a demonstrable change in policy-making culture at the highest levels, through the institutionalisation of historical thinking amongst civil servants.
A theme within Professor David Mosse's anthropological research focuses on the relationship between policy, practice and effects in international development. His field-based ethnographic research challenges assumptions about policy implementation and the nature of success and failure in aid programming. His novel approach to questions of policy analysis and policy change has been widely influential on thinking among policymakers and practitioners across a range of organisations, sectors and countries. It has enhanced the capacity for adaptive self-critical understanding of the aid process among practitioners and aid organisations, while also demonstrating the importance of researcher-practitioner engagement in improving the delivery of aid and development programmes.
This research, on (i) Britain's refusal to intervene militarily in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 and (ii) the history of humanitarian interventions in general, has received considerable attention from policy makers and attentive publics. It has contributed to the questioning in British political circles of the `conservative pessimism' which in the past often led to an unwillingness to act over humanitarian disasters. It has also contributed to the wider emergence of the norm of a `responsibility to protect', whereby governments qualify the classical presumption of non-intervention with a degree of commitment to protect a people when it is under attack from its own government.