Horizon Scanning and Policy Writing: Identifying Tomorrows’ Questions so we can find Answers Today
Speaker: Prof. Anne Adams
Recent past events have shown how uncertain the future can be around technology developments, health and wellbeing, climate change, inequalities, democracy and international conflicts. Yet we need to think through potential futures to plan our research, policies and action plans (including curriculum plans). But how do we capture the valuable insights from varied people in an equitable and effective way? Current methods have left valuable voices unheard. Policy also has the potential for amazing impact from our research. But to gain that impact policy requires a specific kind of writing skill.
In this presentation to CALRG, Anne Adams, will contribute insights and findings from two projects; recent parliamentary and national horizon scanning process and an internal research group horizon scanning activity. The parliamentary and national project covered 12 policy-led fields of: climate, environment, transport and infrastructure, Business/trade, Education/work, international affairs, Housing/Levelling up, crime/justice, health/social care, culture/media/sports, digital innovation and science, parliamentary/public administration. The internal research horizon scanning was for the ‘professional digital learning’ group.
Recent developments into scalable inclusive horizon scanning will be presented including the development of an AI ‘proof of concept’ to enable scalable ‘first steps’ developing inclusivity into research and policy horizon scanning. Finding the right in-roads into policy writing and uptake can also be difficult. Finally, this presentation will provide some top tips (including transferable academic skills) on ‘policy-writing’ as an output from horizon scanning.
Anne Adams; Christothea Herodotou; Kevin Mcleod; Richard Greenwood; Peter Devine
Biography
Professor Adams (engaged practice and research) has extensive publications and large-scale international research portfolio (over £6Million) producing international collaboration (across Europe, Africa, Asia), interdisciplinary research knowledge exchange & policy experience (e.g. Westminster Parliament, Microsoft, BT, Cannon, GOOGLE, College of Policing, NHS and MoD) producing award-winning outputs (e.g. WISE Award presented by HRH Princess Royal). She is currently leading the development of a Horizon Scanning method applied across parliament and nationally across all UK universities.