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PolicyWISE Training: How PolicyWISE are you?

At PolicyWISE, one of our aims is to encourage and support research and researchers to think comparatively from the outset, broadening the impact of their work and the benefit they can bring to society, communities and citizens.

This is integral to the need to produce a robust evidence base that can be used to expand policy engagement and knowledge exchange across the UK and Ireland.

So as part of our work we have been asking; how PolicyWISE are you? ...and we’ve been pleased to find that plenty of people know their Stormont from their Holyrood! But we also know that navigating policy engagement, let alone across multiple nations, can be daunting for many, so our training sessions are designed to help with that.

PolicyWISE Training aims to provides researchers with a better understanding of why and how to do four nations policy engagement, throughout the lifespan of their research, including:

  • Understanding the different government systems and structures around the UK and Ireland
  • Understanding four nations policy engagement and why we do it
  • Some practical tools and prompts to start your policy engagement journey including how to communicate with policymakers, how to map your policy territory and build your profile.

 

We also work ‘the other way’ and are able support civil servants and other policymakers develop their understanding of research and knowledge exchange, how it can assist their work, and support them to ‘think comparatively’.

Many organisations and universities provide excellent policy engagement training opportunities for researchers. The PolicyWISE offer is unique as we provide a genuine UK and Ireland-wide approach, rather than focusing solely on engaging with Whitehall and Westminster.

We engage in and across the nations, bridging policymaker and research communities across the UK and Ireland. We believe that ‘thinking comparatively’ is important for researchers and policymakers as it helps create more evidence-informed policy, it recognises the reality of different contexts and builds up an understanding of the diversity of decision-making across our nations. These are all essential for successful for policy engagement and impact in our contemporary devolved context.
 

As a team of policy professionals and researchers we draw on our own experiences of working in this field as part of the training, sharing our learning from successes… and the odd mistake along the way!

If you’d like to hear more about our training and how we could work with you then please do get in touch: policywise@open.ac.uk