What we do
The CAPE project aims to better understand and to enhance academic-policy engagement in different geographical and policy contexts across England. CAPE is providing knowledge that can help to improve the ways that universities engage with national government, parliament and local and regional authorities.
Our consortium brings together a strong network drawn from universities, policy organisations and think tanks. CAPE will design, test and evaluate interventions to improve the quality and agility of academic input into public policy. It places a strong emphasis on improving the diversity of engagements and participants.
Impact is at the heart of what we do. Our activities directly address topical policy issues through a co-productive approach between researchers, policy professionals and other stakeholders. Targeted evaluation practices are embedded in our work to ensure continuous learning and enable us to build robust, effective policy engagement interventions.
Project aims
- Build capacity and capability within universities and amongst policy professionals through training programmes and skills development.
- Develop activities and mechanisms to promote engagement and knowledge exchange at different levels of government and in different geographical contexts.
- Develop an evidence and knowledge base through ongoing, embedded evaluation and the provision of evidence-based frameworks and toolkits for use by universities and policy stakeholders.
- Incubate a Centre for Universities and Public Policy to provide an online platform for networking and sharing project resources for widespread use.
Outcomes
Over the next four years, CAPE aims to make a substantial contribution to informing public policy development and to deliver evidence-informed best practice.
Through the delivery of collaborative academic-policy engagement activities across our partner institutions, CAPE will enhance routes for academic-policy engagement, and support the development of academic-policy engagement across the university sector and in different public policy spheres.
The project will:
- Deliver knowledge exchange and academic-policy engagement activities to inform ongoing policy development in topical areas
- Widely disseminate the learning and evaluation of the project on an ongoing basis to support shared learning across the university sector and with policy professionals.
- Develop resources to support academic-policy engagement, including guidance, evaluation and impact frameworks, learning toolkits on evidence use, and case studies.