Written by Dr Neil Barnett
Neil Barnett is a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Leeds Beckett University and a Y-PERN Policy Fellow. Neil has been involved in developing academic policy engagement models to link Yorkshire & Humber Councils (YHC) research requirements to Y-PERN. His work focuses around methodically communicating YHC research needs to the Y-PERN Academic Steering Group, simultaneously ensuring YHC remains informed about ongoing initiatives and progress within the Y-PERN network. He is also responsible for researching the impacts of devolution.
Local Government has had at best a patchy relationship with research and use of evidence in policy making, one which has waxed and waned over the decades. The 1960’s and early 70’s saw a burgeoning interest in ‘Research and Intelligence’, with many of the newer, bigger local authorities (LAs) following the then fashionable managerial style of corporate planning and long-term strategising and employing their own R&I staff.
The Local Government Research and Information Association was established in 1974 and continues today. However, government cutbacks brought an end to lots of the investment in this area. Some Local Authorities (LAs) retained arrangements with university centres (e.g. the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham) and local Higher Education institutions.
A focus on ‘evidence-based policy making’ in the New Labour years gave rise to more, government-funded evaluation of policies and programmes, leading to a short-term ‘boom’ for selected research centres, but did not serve to change a fragile relationship in a fundamental way.
Similarly, the Scrutiny function, when introduced into Local Authorities in 2000, and intended to provide a basis for evidence-based policy evaluation, with ‘backbench’ councillors taking evidence and conducting investigations, has never really established itself in most places in the way intended.
As ever, austerity has served to decimate what was left. Nevertheless, for some time there has been excellent sources of research open to LAs via membership organisations like the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU) and the Association of Public Service Excellence (APSE), for example, which often draw on academic expertise.
However, these same financial pressures have ‘hollowed out’ the internal capacity of Local Authorities even further, with central policy and evaluation roles being prime targets for necessary savings. In turn, this has led to a renewed ‘turn’ to academia and think tanks for research and evidence, catching a ‘wave of interest in the co-production of research and reciprocal learning relationships with universities and others; for example, the number of Knowledge Exchange Partnerships between Local Authorities and universities began to grow in the 2010’s. This push from LAs met with an open door in research centres, themselves under financial pressure and now working in an environment where funding bodies increasingly sought evidence of impact.
Government policy prompts and initiatives, including the setting out of departmental areas of research interest and development of ‘what works centres’ fed into research granting bodies and this, along with the revised Research Excellence Framework putting more emphasis in impact, led to new forms of collaboration like the York Policy Engine and the agreement on Areas of Research Interest between Leeds City Council and the University of Leeds.
The development of Combined Authorities has given more impetus to these trends- charged as they are with more strategic thinking whilst establishing themselves and their internal research capacities, they have driven a need for data and assistance in planning and evaluation. Along with LAs, as they have developed, they have increasingly sought to establish close relationships with research centres.
This renewed environment has in turn given rise to much comment on the efficacy of these relationships. Practical experience points to several barriers to establishing collaboration and feeding research into LA policymaking. These include, obviously, the resources (in money and time available within Local Authorities), time pressures, differing academic/LA cultures, and policy and research timescales being out of synch (For an overview and experiences of barriers, see for example, Cheetham et al (2023) ; Bowen et al (2021) ; Walker and Stride (2024).
The more recent interest in cultural barriers, along with the move towards more ’embedded’ research has seen a greater emphasis put on relationships- that is, building and maintaining relationships, along with the pragmatic process of negotiating working at the ‘nexus’ of academic research and policy making and navigating the interface between political and research cultures.
Research here has been perceived more as a social activity with the importance focussed on the ‘social fabric of learning’, in an ‘interactive/emergent’ process (Walker and Stride, 2024). Crawford and Carroll (2024), using the Leeds City Council and University example, thus focus on how these relational elements can give institutional support, with the aim of sustaining ‘non-linear’, networked forms of communities of practice, stressing co-production and co-design. Others have seen this work as being one step in a process of aiming for an ideal of a ‘whole systems’ approach (Hock et al, 2020). In this vein, Cheetham et al (2019) set out a Community of Practice Logic approach, embodied in the Local Authority Champions of Research (LACoR) model, deemed by them to be the most appropriate for meeting the complex environment in which LAs operate (See p. 45 here).
The wider literature on public administration and management, and organisation studies in general, however, serves to caution us against the reification of network approaches. Network forms of working should not be seen as a panacea, but as one possible form of organising; moreover, alternative forms (networks commonly being contrasted with hierarchical/bureaucratic and market-style forms) may for good reason predominate, and in practice, they co-exist. Such a recognition leads us away from one form of ‘model’ relationship to a more considered ‘horses for courses’ approach for different needs. Hence ‘it’s the mix that matters’ (Rhodes, 1997), with network and more ‘embedded’ practices taking their place alongside, and often inter-laced with, other more ‘traditional’ ones. Establishing collaborative research networks thus continues to involve the negotiation and sustaining of flexible, trusting relationships amidst the necessary frameworks of more formal accountability, and the pressures of securing and maintaining funding for both LAs and research centres.
