Policymakers are increasingly turning to the public for answers to tricky policy challenges, acknowledging that solutions need to be rooted in people’s lived experiences and suited to how they navigate the world.
But prevailing approaches to this are flawed: the time and facilitation needed to explore complex topics in adequate depth can prove costly and slow, and these approaches routinely struggle to engage or empower voices that have long been marginalised in the policymaking process. These shortcomings and a limited evidence base on their effectiveness mean policymakers can be averse to employing them to inform significant or contentious decisions.
UKRI – and others – therefore noted the need to pilot new approaches to public engagement that tackle these deficiencies, and to better understand the contexts and combinations in which those new approaches work best. To this end, UKRI funded nine projects with £60,000 of funding to pilot and evaluate new approaches to public dialogue, supported by the RSA.
The scope of these varied immensely, with topics ranging from the climate crisis to youth mental health, neurodiversity in schools, and nutritional choices. What they all had in common, however, was a commitment, and an innovative approach, to improving public engagement. These novel forms of public dialogue proved effective in eliciting informed input based on participants’ lived experiences, surfacing novel perspectives, and granting insight into participants’ underlying beliefs, values, and concerns. Experts and policymakers remarked on participants’ meaningful, nuanced, and informed contributions on complex issues, and the valuable insights they generated.
Participants themselves also found this an enjoyable and worthwhile experience, forming new connections and bolstering their skills and confidence to contribute to complex discussions.
There is evident scope for these methods to add value in policymaking and service design, either directly – by soliciting and generating recommendations informed by deliberation, evidence, and lived experience – or indirectly – by improving policymakers’ understanding of people’s latent preferences.
But there is more work to do. The Rethinking Public Dialogue pilots have demonstrated proof of concept but, as noted above, entail trade-offs, require specific skill-sets and competencies, and their practical uptake will still require further research.
Read our report to learn more about the pilot and our recommendations for taking forward public dialogue.
Download the Re-Thinking Public Dialogue: Learning from experimental pilots report (0.6 MB).
Project
In an exciting collaboration with UKRI and their team working to promote greater public engagement in research, we are championing pilot projects that challenge the boundaries of conversations between the public, researchers, and policymakers.
