3.1 When should you engage with policy-makers?
The most effective stakeholder engagements are at the start of a project, with dialogue throughout the project lifecycle beginning at the planning stage.
Policy-makers and other stakeholders might have useful knowledge or suggestions that can help to shape your research and improve your impact (NCCPE, n.d.). If your project is significant, it may warrant a full-scale meeting of policy-makers and professionals. A workshop format is particularly suitable for engaging stakeholders during the lifecycle of a project.
It’s also important to understand the
- at the beginning or end of an individual’s time in office
- at the start of a new parliamentary session
- before a spending review cycle
- at certain times where events or public and media pressure create a crisis point.
The Covid-19 pandemic is perhaps a classic example of an event that has created a crisis point where policy-makers may (but may not) be open to decisions that draw on AMR policy. These windows of opportunity occur when attention is drawn to a problem, and if there are policy ideas to solve it and political incentives to make them happen. An example is shown in Case Study 3.
Case Study 3: Engaging with the UK’s AMR policy (HM Government, 2019c)
The UK’s twenty-year vision and five-year NAP on AMR were published in January 2019 (HM Government, 2019a, 2019b). The NAP builds on the earlier five-year AMR strategy between 2013 and 2018 (HM Government, 2013), and sets out the first step towards the UK’s vision for AMR in 2040.
Ahead of the publication of the vision and NAP in January 2019, the number of opportunities to engage with AMR policy rose significantly:
- The Health and Social Care Select Committee held an AMR inquiry between July and October 2018, gathering oral and written evidence. Those giving evidence at the oral evidence sessions included senior level officials:
- Healthcare Epidemiologist Consultant in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, Public Health England
- Chief Executive, Veterinary Medicines Directorate, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
- Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care
- Chief Medical Officer for England, Department for Health and Social Care
- UK Chief Veterinary Officer, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
- However, written evidence was submitted by all interested AMR stakeholders that wanted to provide it. Being aware of parliamentary events and how to engage with them is very important: providing written evidence to a parliamentary inquiry is an accessible but indirect way to help improve policy. (If you’re interested, you can see examples of the written evidence to the inquiry (Health and Social Care Committee, 2018b).)
- The Health and Social Care Select Committee’s AMR inquiry report was published in October 2018 (Health and Social Care Committee, 2018a). In the same month, members of Parliament (MPs) questioned the UK government on its strategy for tackling AMR (Hansard, 2018). AMR stakeholders that knew about the timing of this debate could have contacted their local MP and encouraged them to attend the debate and present evidence and ideas to the government – again, indirectly influencing policy.
- The UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) provides impartial, non-partisan and peer-reviewed briefings, designed to make scientific research accessible to the UK Parliament. Between July 2018 and February 2019 it published three briefings on AMR:
- ‘Antimicrobial resistance and immunisation’ (Hall and Bunn, 2018)
- ‘Reducing UK antibiotic use in animals’ (Evans and Border, 2018)
- ‘Reservoirs of antimicrobial resistance’ (Dowling and Border, 2019).
- POST gathered insights from AMR experts to ensure that the briefings were comprehensive and balanced. This included AMR experts from academia, industry, government, the third sector and beyond. This is another example of an accessible way to contribute evidence that could help to shape policy.
The examples in Case Study 3 highlight the importance of catching windows of opportunity around political events, such as the publication of a NAP on AMR. Keeping track of the political calendar and being aware of all of the opportunities where a government or
Strategically selecting when to engage increases the chance that your idea will fall on receptive ears. Electoral and legislative calendars can help you to choose a good time: meetings with elected officials tend to be much more effective towards the beginning of a term (when policy priorities are being set) than later on.
When in doubt, engage early. By the time a bill comes up for a vote or a rule is in its final stages, most policy-makers will have been discussing it for months or longer: even highly credible input will be unlikely to change minds. Look out for newsletters or podcasts that can help you stay aware of when the topics that you care about are coming up for debate – and talk to legislators before this happens. Submit comments on draft rules and participate in stakeholder workshops when they are offered.
Current events can yield extra opportunities to advance your work. The value of a news-generated
If there is no window of opportunity on the horizon, it is still important to stay engaged with the people whose ideas will be drawn upon if and when the issue becomes salient. This also means that, to achieve impact, you may be talking about a piece of research years after you have completed it (IfG, 2020).
3 Engaging with policy-makers
