An invitation for civic collaboration: the team Leeds way
Dr Abi Rowson, of the Horizons Institute, reflects on her secondment with Leeds City Council supporting development of their Areas of Research Interest.
#teamLeeds
Since September 2023 I have been on secondment for one day a week in the Policy & Intelligence Team at Leeds City Council, working with the brilliant Mike Eakins and Rosie Armitage. We want to create better ways for researchers and council officers to come together in fruitful partnerships that will benefit the citizens of Leeds. To that end, we have been refining the council’s Areas of Research Interest (ARI), a key mechanism for research-policy engagement.
Launch of refreshed Areas of Research Interest
In Spring 2024, Leeds City Council and the University of Leeds will launch a refreshed set of Areas of Research Interest, newly grouped under the Council’s Best City Ambition pillars of Health & Wellbeing, Inclusive Growth and Zero Carbon. Look out for the information event on 25 April 2024 where key council officers will introduce the new ARI and give an overview of their priority research and evidence needs.
The Leeds City Council Areas of Research Interest provide a route into understanding the knowledge needs of the local authority. The ARI are what are called boundary objects, signalling the way for people beyond the boundaries of a particular organisation to engage with people within it and enabling cross-sectoral working. But I often find myself describing the ARI as an invitation for collaboration.
Importantly, the LCC ARI will ideally include who to contact, and give an idea of the time frame under which council colleagues are operating. Timescales are one of the things that we hear, anecdotally, create barriers to collaboration. We heard from senior officers that university research can sometimes move more slowly than meets the council’s needs, with one describing the pace as ‘glacial’.
But my time at the council has brought into focus why #teamLeeds is so important, and the real benefits that working in partnership can bring. It’s not all been plain sailing: the funding gap facing local authorities nationally has been an ever-present concern, and although council colleagues are invariably positive about working with the university, sometimes, the reality of front-line service delivery means that engaging with research cannot be the priority. That might be a hard lesson for us at the university, even when we know that our research could help those service users and communities. But it is not an unwillingness nor a lack of understanding about the affordances of research from council colleagues; invariably it is time and money which militate against engagement.
Funding opportunities to support research-policy engagement
We hope that by publishing the LCC Areas of Research Interest academic colleagues and their partners will be better able to compete for internal and/or external research funding which respond to local needs.
We know that some of the research or evidence that the council needs will already exist: indeed, it might well be common knowledge in disciplines. One challenge is how to design and incentivise work which will untap this knowledge. Various internal schemes at the University of Leeds could provide opportunities to unlock this potential: for example, the Impact Accelerator Accounts (IAA), the Research England Policy Support Fund (next call: May 2024), and various Horizons Institute programmes.
Some Areas of Research Interest will require collaborative working to co-produce new knowledge. These areas might be perennial and longstanding, requiring of longitudinal research in order to understand and address them. Other areas will be characterised as requests for data and evidence or collaborations in the short term.
Networks for connection
The research challenges facing the city are complex and often require interdisciplinary responses. In the Horizons Institute we fund and support interdisciplinary networks of researchers and external partners, in particular, through our Challenge Theme Networks, which include: Mental Health, Physical Activity & Movement (InterActive), Remaking Places and Reimagine Ageing. Many researchers in the university have made connections to local and regional partners in government and the third sector through these networks, and so I encourage you to join one (or more!) if you want to meet colleagues and explore ways to collaborate.
What’s next?
Work to bring our two institutions together for mutual benefit will continue, and we are optimistic that by strengthening research-policy engagement there will be tangible improvements for people’s lives in Leeds. Leeds City Council is forward thinking in its engagement with evidence-informed policy and is ambitious about strengthening its own capacity around research: our two institutions have much to learn from each other.
There are real opportunities for building collaborative partnerships, and at different scales — so please do get in touch if you want to explore these further. One key part of the strategic collaboration is the development of a framework which will help both organisations understand each other better. An openness to different ways of working and organisational culture is key, but if this secondment has taught me anything, it is that we are all ultimately #teamLeeds.
Background context
The University and Leeds City Council have been building collaborative partnerships for decades, and through different routes, but since the Collaborative Review of 20201, there has been a sustained effort to provide strategic collaboration, guided by a Steering Group of university and council colleagues, chaired by DVC Research & Innovation Nick Plant. Working groups, with members drawn from the council, Policy Leeds, the Leeds Social Sciences Institute, the Horizons Institute, LeedsActs! and Y-PERN, have created opportunities for research-policy engagement at the local level, either through new research project collaborations, or through bringing existing data and evidence into policymaking.
A significant output of this collaboration has been the introduction of a mechanism for research-policy engagement, the Leeds City Council Areas of Research Interest (ARI). In 2020 we piloted our first set of ARI around key priority areas. You can read more about this in the Policy Leeds blog.
Serendipitously, the ARI work coincided with a call from the Research England Policy Support Fund. This meant that the council’s priorities could be highlighted alongside the Policy Support Fund call, providing a funding route to develop these research-policy relationships. The Policy Support Fund projects have given rise to a wide range of co-produced, impactful research collaborations in Leeds and have provided evidence and data to inform policymaking. A full list of past and present projects can be found on the Policy Leeds website.
Dr Abi Rowson is Acting Head of Interdisciplinary Research for the Horizons Institute
Get in touch: a.rowson@leeds.ac.uk
Find more information on policy collaborations from across University of Leeds on the Policy Leeds website. If you would like to keep in touch with our work between signposts, please connect with us on LinkedIn, find us on X (formerly Twitter), or you can email us at policyleeds@leeds.ac.uk
