Mainstreaming Civic Engagement Activities in HE: How an understanding of policy work can moderate the challenge of policy change.
Conor Galvin (University College Dublin)
Abstract
The work informing this paper has its origins in a casual remark by one of the participants at a University of Edinburgh colloquium on education policy research. She claimed that all the ‘wrong people’ were there. Given that the event brought together a significant number of well-respected academic researchers and senior civil servants with responsibilities for research and education policy from across the UK and Ireland, the remark might seem surprising. However, it is important in two ways:
First, it offers insight into a major and ongoing shift internationally in the practices and organisational forms through which public policy is generated and so draws attention to the changing face of ‘policy work’. It does this by raising the intriguing question – who, then, are the 'right people' and how do they generate and gain currency for their ideas? Is there a difference in the ways they go about policy activities as compared to how, for example, those attending that colloquium would ordinarily do? If, as commentators such as Ball (2007) have argued, we are witnessing an increasingly evident shift away from conventional techniques of co-ordination and control on the part of large-scale bureaucratic state forms and their replacement by more evaluative agencies and discourses, how do these present in relation to policy agenda-setting and policy formation? The answer would seem to lie (in part at least) in the idea that the work of governing involves more than the activities of government – reflected in the increasing use of the term ‘governance’ in the literature and discourse of policy and politics internationally – and consequently that policy work increasingly involves the activities of a range of non-governmental and extra-governmental bodies. Attention to the role of non-governmental agencies and ‘think-tanks’ in policy work help explain this new policy activism. And this may connect to what it is to be a right person.
Second, the remark draws attention to the frustratingly hit-and-miss nature of researching to influence public policy. Social science led policy research, for instance, is often seen to concern producing valid knowledge about an area of concern and the institutional frameworks in which it occurs (Schuller 2004): as such much of what academic researchers do is bound up with a particularly interpretative conceptualisation of the research act. ‘Quality’ is a prized feature of such research. But there is no guarantee that quality in research will result in currency within the policy process. Indeed, the disconnection of policy from research is a staple of debate in this area. And even when research does enter the policy cycle, there is little evidence that its use is in any way consistent (Furlong and White 2001). Education research is not alone in this: policy research in other areas of the social and human sciences is equally challenged by this conundrum – both in this country (Laffan 2007) and beyond (Burton 2006; Citi & Rhodes 2007).
This paper proposes that the understanding of ability to influence public policy in general needs to be reset within a discussion of identity, agency and an emerging network of 'new' policy practitioners. It considers how a new policy work variant may be starting to emerge in Ireland within which the traditional role of public policy research is increasingly in tension with centralist concerns for governance in what McCarthy (2006) describes as our ‘small, open economy’. Much of this is argued to relate to the rather unique role of advocacy coalitions that Ireland generates and the equally unique role that our think-tanks assume – both of which are seen to increasingly impact the emergence of new policy work practices. What is important in this present context is the profound difficulty this broader policy context could represent for those interested in significantly raising the place of service learning and other forms of civic engagement activities in Irish higher education.
