Policy Fellowship with Newham Council: Improving Participative Policy Making

We are very pleased to be working with the Capabilities in Academic-Policy Engagement (CAPE) project to develop a new policy fellowship opportunity funded by CAPE.

This 12-month project will focus on building the capability of academic-policy maker-citizen collaboration in helping organisations adopt and embed participative policymaking. It will build on existing practice by Newham Council and its anchor institutions, universities, the Civic and Democratic Participation Commission, as well as research within the field on open and participative policy-making, policy design and civic and democratic participation. It will be open to people working within CAPE’s partner universities.

Policy Fellowship with Newham Council: Improving Participative Policy Making

Context

Through the Capabilities in Academic-Policy Engagement (CAPE) project, we are pleased to announce a new Policy Fellowship opportunity with CAPE and the London Borough of Newham.

Giving people the chance to have their say forms part of a radical overhaul of democracy in the borough, designed to involve residents in decisions and build trust in the Council and make it a happier and healthier place to live. Newham Council has pledged to make the borough a beacon of participatory democracy.

Since 2018, the Council has pioneered ways to put residents at the heart of everything it does, launching a Democracy Commission, developing the largest community engagement programme in the country through its Community Assemblies, participatory budgeting in each of our neighbourhoods, a national leader in health & youth participation, as well as the UK’s first permanent Citizen’s Assembly.

The pandemic has made even more visible the opportunity to mobilise residents to develop activities together to help each other and improve their neighbourhoods, and the Council has worked with its partners to support local communities to do that, notably through Help Newham and our Social Welfare Alliance.

1. Embedding democratic participation in policy making

These participatory mechanisms develop new civic skills, behaviours and relationships for residents, public services, universities and its partners. They open up spaces for democratic participation and policy making that weren’t expected or possible before. If we need to improve how universities & public services work together throughout the policy making process, it’s critical that we can make use of our mutual strengths to embed participation in that.

What infrastructure is needed to enable universities to better use evidence from participative policy making and to create or inform new participatory mechanisms themselves and the skills to adopt them — given the dual roles of universities as researchers, thought leaders and educators? What infrastructure is needed to ensure the outcomes from citizen assemblies & participative policy making can make a difference to the ways a council operates, and the way citizens can become active participants in the policy space? If citizens assemblies show that citizens can be policy makers, what other roles can they play?

A local focus in Newham can provide a strong platform and test bed — given the strong commitment and work in participatory policy making and public engagement by Newham Council, UCL and other local stakeholders. However, there is an opportunity to influence the capabilities of open and participative policy making across universities & public services nationally, and CAPE is a strong platform to do that.

As such, they show the need and opportunity for other functions to become participative, such as how we design, commission and run our services, the way we use data and insight, how we fund and support our partners and how we develop our workforce.

Newham Council wants to explore even better ways to involve citizens in policy design and delivery in order to embed open policy making in the ways the organisation work. It wants to work with its anchor institutions, who also play a major role in people’s lives, on how it embeds participative democracy across the borough.

2. Influencing the development of capabilities of open & participative policy making across the public service & academic sector

Newham isn’t the only council that has invested in citizens assemblies or similar mechanisms that enable residents to be policy makers on big challenges. Universities are major anchor institutions in local areas and have a major role in the policy making process in shaping and developing evidence, developing people on new capabilities and educating new generations on the skills needed for the future — and participative policy making and design. Partnership between public services and universities is therefore essential to developing these capabilities.

There is an opportunity for this fellowship to convene and influence a community of practice of practitioners working in this field, to learn from other areas and explore the development of infrastructure that can be used beyond the borders of the borough.

About Newham

Newham Council is the third most populated borough in London and one of the most diverse, young and entrepreneurial. It is London’s fastest growing Metropolitan Centre and only Enterprise Zone.

Its Community Wealth Building approach is a pioneering and bold inclusive economic approach that aims to address poverty in the borough as well ensure that investment coming into Newham benefits all residents.

Its strategy, Towards a Better Newham represents a fundamental shift placing the health and wellbeing of residents and race equality central to the Council’s aspirations of inclusive growth, quality jobs and fairness in Newham.

About CAPE

The £10 million, 4-year Research England-funded CAPE project is a partnership between UCL and the universities of Cambridge, Manchester, Northumbria and Nottingham, in collaboration with the Government Office for Science, the Parliamentary Office for Science & Technology, the Alliance for Useful Evidence, and the Transforming Evidence Hub, funded by Research England.

CAPE has been created to support effective and sustained engagement between academics and policy professionals across the higher education sector. CAPE comprises four broad workstreams under which activities related to the academic-policy interventions will be co-designed with policy partners: training; knowledge exchange events; seed funding; and policy fellowships. Evaluation is embedded across the project and integrated in the delivery of activities in order to ‘learn as we go’ and share emerging knowledge with university and public policy stakeholders.

To apply, check out the role description.