The presentations at the excellent 'Mobility in Adaptation to Climate Change Conference', hosted in London in May, were primarily research presentations in which academics shared key findings from cutting-edge studies. During their Q&As, however, the discussion frequently turned to the policy implications of the research. What, for example, should a development-minded policymaker in New Zealand or Australia do about their visa allocation policy if told that climate-vulnerable Pacific households benefit hugely from access to circular migration, but that the long separation times cause societal damage?

That question—how research can feed into policy— was the subject of a workshop discussion at the conference. I gave a short intervention drawing on my work at the Center for Global Development, where much of my work consists of producing and 'translating' research for policy impact. This intervention is summarised below, couched largely in the form of questions aimed at an academic hoping to push findings beyond the academy and into action.

Is policy impact a proactive goal, or a possible result of exploratory research?

Broadly, there are two processes through which research might approach policy impact. You might start from a position of a general lack of knowledge about a situation, in which the actions to be taken—and actors involved— cannot be known beforehand. In this case the research must be undertaken before conclusions can be drawn, and policy implications can only emerge once a knowledge gap is filled. That would look like this:

In another, it may be known that action is needed, but the key need is to assess what should be done and to make a case for it. Potentially what needs to be done may even be known in advance, or strongly suspected, and research is needed to strengthen the case for action. For example, it may be known that inhabitants of an informal settlement lack access to education; what may not be known is how this affects their electoral sympathies or their labour market outcomes and fiscal contributions. Research that filled that gap might incentivise action to correct the injustice.

A research process aiming to have impact in this context could, simplistically, look like this:

Exploratory research is certainly not inferior to research that proactively seeks to address a policy gap, but it is easier to achieve policy impact via the second process: the research process can proactively consider the target audience and deliberately supply the knowledge needed.

Who is the policy audience?

Who needs to act to rectify the inefficiency, or injustice, identified by the research? What do they need to know? Can the audience be invited into the research process, assisting in framing research questions and informing the researcher as to the pieces of knowledge needed? The earlier a policy audience can be identified, the more likely it is that impact is achievable.

What are their incentives?

What do they care about? How could the research findings, and their policy implications, be framed in a way that speaks to these incentives? For a given piece of research one relevant policy audience might be an elected politician or their staff, interested mostly in framing related to electoral outcomes; another audience might be civil servants interested in long-term fiscal stability. The same piece of research, and the same policy conclusions, may need to be framed differently to get a hearing.

What does a policymaker need to do?

Can this be set out clearly, without a hedge of caveats? And do the recommended policy actions lie within their power, or would action require cross-agency or multi-level coordination and the navigation of new sets of incentives? If so, action can become exponentially harder to obtain. What, instead, can a given actor be asked to do that they can do independently? Actions that sit within a single portfolio are much more likely to be achievable. Equally, an action that calls for an improvement to an existing process with a high marginal impact, but relatively little cost will be more likely to be taken up than a proposal of a paradigm shift.

How can research findings (and their policy implications) be made accessible and usable?

In many systems policymakers will be civil servants, generalists rather than specialists, covering multiple policy areas and without deep expertise on any. They need clear, jargon-free findings summarised briefly, with clear takeaways. Caveats can and should be included, but not to the extent that they wholly blot out policy implications. Blogs are a key tool in this regard. If you want to have an impact, why write a long paper without summarising what's important about it? The marginal cost in time and effort of condensing a paper into a blog is very minor and greatly outweighed by the potential impact.

Blogs are useful for policymakers, but it's worth noting that they are also now useful for the AI tools by which policymakers are increasingly informed, and which typically don't have access to paywalled papers. (Does this mean you should consider writing a blog in part to get your research into an AI's field of view? Yes, quite possibly.)

How can the chances of action be increased?

There might be other actors interested in the recommended policy actions beyond the immediate audience, who might be able to push for action. What are their incentives? Getting these actors involved might also require working across forums—injecting research and recommendations into multiple relevant areas of discussion. For example, it might mean engaging with an elected official; with an ongoing court case; with a parliamentary inquiry; with civil servants in a national ministry; and with a local government. Working across routes to impact increases the chance that impact will happen.

Can you be persistent?

The key limitation faced by policymakers is time (also described as 'bandwidth' or 'capacity'). This forces prioritisation. At different points, however, the relative prioritisation given to a topic might shoot up— as an election approaches, say, or a news story breaks, or a disaster occurs. At this moment a window might open within which something new can happen. This 'something new' is most likely to be an idea that has already been floating around and discussed: being persistent in keeping an idea in discussion raises the chance that it one day becomes policy. This fact clashes with the limited timeframes of funded academic projects but is nonetheless important.

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