Jessica Benson-Egglenton and Matthew Flinders
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Understanding the dynamics of research policy fellowships: an evaluative analysis of impacts and ecosystem effects’.
An early evaluation of a major UK policy fellowship programme reveals both promising impacts and significant challenges in bridging the research-policy divide.
This blog post is based on research evaluating the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Policy Fellows scheme (2021-2023).
In 2021, the ESRC invested £2.5 million in placing 24 academic researchers within government departments for up to 18 months. This ‘Research to Policy’ (R2P) fellowship programme aimed to inject research expertise directly into policymaking while helping academics better understand how government works. Our evaluation of this pilot programme reveals three key findings.
First, the fellowships achieved significant short-term impacts across multiple levels:
- Individual level: Fellows gained crucial insights into policy processes, while civil servants developed new analytical skills and research awareness. As one fellow noted, “I know now how to approach them [officials]. I know now how to understand their problem. How to frame research in a way that is both academically sound but also useful.”
- Policy level: Fellows contributed directly to policy development, from establishing new international agreements to supporting multi-decade environmental planning. Several created tools and frameworks that are now used across Whitehall.
- System level: The programme helped ‘join up’ departments, created new networks that spanned sectors, and contributed to building trust in research evidence.
Second, however, our evaluation identified a significant challenge: civil service ‘churn’ (i.e. the constant movement of staff between roles and departments). This undermined the potential for lasting impact. One host explained: “Unless their [the fellow’s] work has been fully embedded… it then requires somebody’s efforts to keep doing that reminding.”
Third, this highlights a crucial distinction between achieving ‘thin’ short-term impacts versus ‘thick’ long-term systemic change. While individual fellows made valuable contributions, creating lasting cultural change in how government utilises evidence and works with academic researchers is a more difficult but not impossible challenge.
These findings matter because they offer practical insights for improving research-policy engagement. The perceived success of this pilot has already led to an expanded scheme featuring 48 fellows and 21 hosts and contributed to the launch of several new fellowship and secondment schemes across the civil service.
Our research suggests several ways to strengthen these initiatives:
- Create better ‘docking points’ between research and policy communities;
- Develop alumni networks that outlast individual fellowships;
- Innovate in terms of creating different STEPS (short-term experiential placements);
- Invest in Policy-to-Research (P2R) initiatives and not just Research-to-Policy (R2P);
- Ensure that universities know how to maximise the organisational learning potential of returning policy fellows;
- Provide training and support for civil servants hosting academic fellows; and
- Establish a central hub to coordinate fellowship schemes and capture learning.
Most importantly, this evaluation shows that bridging the research-policy divide requires more than just producing better evidence – it demands building better systems for using that evidence. More specifically, it demands an acknowledgment that high-trust low-cost inter-personal relationships are very often key to the successful absorption of research in policymaking processes. But building, sustaining and nurturing relationships at the nexus between research and policy is in itself a resource-intensive activity, especially given high levels of churn.
As the UK government increases investment in fellowship programmes, understanding what works (and what doesn’t) becomes increasingly crucial. Going forward, we suggest that an effectively managed central repository or ‘strategic brain’ about R2P/P2R opportunities will be critical to increasing systemic capacity and harnessing the impacts of a vast range of mobility focused fellowships for the benefit of the national science base.
Image credit: Photo by Luke Besley on Unsplash
Jessica Benson-Egglenton
Jessica Benson-Egglenton is a Research Fellow in the Sheffield Institute of Education, with over a decade’s experience in educational research and evaluation.
Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics and Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre at the University of Sheffield. He is also Vice-President of the Political Studies Association and Chair of the Universities Policy Engagement Network.
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Benson-Egglenton, J. & Flinders, M. (2025). Understanding the dynamics of research policy fellowships: an evaluative analysis of impacts and ecosystem effects. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2024D000000040.
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