News

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are seeking to convene a panel of experts on the treatment of Digital Sequence Information in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The panel will focus discussions on Access and Benefit Sharing and discussions will help inform UK’s negotiation strategy ahead of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).  CAPE are exploring the role universities can play in supporting engagement around rapid-policy needs, through the convening of ‘pop-up’, or short-term expertise groups that differ from the Scientific Advisory Council models. CAPE are encouraging colleagues from across UK Higher … Continued

On 22 Nov, 3-4.30pm, we are delighted to invite you to the first in our series of our quarterly sharing sessions, themed around the ‘Incoming Policy Fellowship Model’. You’ll hear from us about CAPE – who we are, what we’re testing and how you can get involved, before we move into a series of talks themed around experiences and reflections of the incoming policy fellowship mechanism and its role in the policy engagement landscape, followed by an audience Q&A. Incoming Policy Fellows are fellowships for policy stakeholders to visit universities to talk to researchers and research services staff about policy pertinent questions. These visits usually last 2-3 … Continued

CAPE invites you to share your thoughts, reflections and experiences of academic-policy engagement. The survey is anonymous, open to all Higher Education professionals in the UK and should take no longer than 15 minutes of your time. We hope that your reflections and experiences will contribute to an evidence base as to what might help better support higher education professionals to collaborate with public policy organisations to deliver stronger, evidence-based public policy. In particular, we aim to understand the following: How (and how often) HE professionals across all job families currently engages and/or supports with public policy. Where the barriers … Continued

A year and a half into our four year project, we took some time to reflect on our collective experience of the project so far, and what we’ve learnt along the way. Starting a project in a pandemic is difficult but brought surprising advantages CAPE commenced exactly as the first lockdown happened. Our usual methods such as meeting stakeholders face-to-face or hosting fellowships in person had to change. It also meant that we weren’t able to hire our project team as quickly which significantly affected what we could do in those embryonic first few months. However at the same time, … Continued

We hope the CAPE collaboration fund will stimulate researchers and public policy professionals to work together in order to develop evidence-informed approaches to policy problems. It’s a key part of CAPE’s work to understand how to strengthen the relationship between the academic and public policy communities. Sarah Chaytor, CAPE Co-Investigator and UCL Co-Lead This week, we are delighted to share that we have officially launched our new funding scheme, the CAPE Collaboration Fund.   The CAPE Collaboration fund aims to build collaborative and co-productive research and activity between academics and policy professionals in an effort to better develop policy work. Up to … Continued

CAPE is hiring a Policy Engagement Project Coordinator who will be based at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) at the University of Cambridge, one of our CAPE partner institutes. At CSaP, the Policy Engagement Project Coordinator for the CAPE project will run a scheme to coordinate 20 Policy Fellowships per year across the five universities, working with colleagues to identify policy professionals to recruit for meetings with academics, as well as academics for matching with meeting and secondment opportunities. The post holder will also deliver CSaP’s participation in a full range of CAPE activities, which will include workshops … Continued

The International Trade Select Committee has published five Areas of Research Interest (ARI) for 2021 to help support the Committee’s scrutiny of UK wide trade policy. The ARI are as follows: Trade negotiations Gender and trade Food standards Developing countries Foreign Policy and Trade Academics at all career stages, research institutions, and experts are encouraged to register their interest in the ARIs, add their existing research in the topic areas, provide their insights, and suggest questions that the Committee could be asking the Government. CAPE Policy Fellow Rob Davies, who through his fellowship at Parliament’s Scrutiny Unit, has been working … Continued

CAPE and Yorkshire Universities (YU) are delighted to welcome the appointment of Dr Richard Whittle, as the first CAPE Regional Development Fellow. Starting on 1 July, Richard will work with YU, the Place-based Economic Recovery Network (PERN) and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, to lead an innovative project tasked with strengthening the use and application of university research to inform public policy in West Yorkshire. Commenting on his appointment, Dr Richard Whittle said: The Universities in Yorkshire produce outstanding insights that could, and should, help shape the effective evidence-based policy, vital for post-pandemic recovery and growth. As a CAPE Policy … Continued

Report of the Capabilities in Academic-Policy Engagement (CAPE) seminar and panel discussion on Chief Scientific Advisors, 14 December 2020 This event was part of CAPE’s programme of work exploring academic-policy engagement within local and regional government and the role that a science advisory function might play. The goal of the discussion was to explore the role of chief scientific advisers (CSAs) and share the perspectives of those who have been or are presently CSAs with national government or public bodies. This note highlights the key points from the panel discussion and consolidates the most salient messages raised during the Q&A … Continued

In December 2020, the Capabilities in Academic-Policy Engagement partnership (CAPE) co-facilitated a workshop with Camden Council at a meeting of the London Policy & Strategy Network. The aim of the workshop was to explore: current policy challenges for local councils difficulties in accessing research evidence and expertise The discussion at the workshop will inform the development of CAPE activities to support engagement with local councils within London and across England.