British Academy Conferences: Overview of Policy Themes

The British Academy’s public policy programme provides insight and knowledge to help frame and address national policy challenges, mobilising insights from across the SHAPE disciplines and translating them into ideas which can inform and enrich policy. This work is organised into four themes:

1. Sustainable futures
2. Social and cultural infrastructure
3. Digital society
4. Governance, trust and voice

Championing the role of SHAPE research in the policy responses to sustainable development, challenging the idea that science and technology can solve these challenges alone.

SHAPE plays a critical role in understanding the complex human and social dimensions to environmental challenges and their solutions. This theme will continue to develop the Academy’s thriving range of projects aimed at championing the role of SHAPE research in the policy responses to sustainable development and achieving a Just Transition while tackling climate change and biodiversity loss.

The theme centres on two core programmes. The Where We Live Next programme explores sustainability through the lens of place and place-based policy, building on our previous Where We Live Now programme which challenged the ‘place-blind’ nature of public policy by examining the visibility of different places, local people and cultures to decision makers.

The second programme is focused on Net Zero Governance, which provides SHAPE-led insights to articulate why governance matters for net zero and examine how good governance can effectively direct, oversee and create accountability for organisations and institutions to contribute to the delivery of the UK commitments to achieving net zero by 2050.

This area of work also includes the SHAPE Sustainability Impact Projects which are designed to bring together researchers and students from the SHAPE disciplines to come up with interdisciplinary solutions to issues of sustainability. The Academy has funded projects at institutions around the UK to work in their community to research sustainability issues and work with stakeholders to pilot evidence-based solutions.

Engaging with the vibrant debate over the 'levelling up' agenda and a growing body of evidence on the critical role of communities and societal relationships in recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social and cultural infrastructure refers to the services and structures that support the quality of life of a nation, region, city or local community. It is an area that has been brought to the fore by the British Academy’s work on Cohesive Societies and the COVID Decade evidence review and policy reports. There is a wealth of SHAPE expertise available to support research on different aspects of social and cultural infrastructure and its role across a range of public policy issues.

The core programme aims to explore the importance of social infrastructure for policy making, investigating how social infrastructure policy interventions can contribute to recovery from COVID-19, with investment in social infrastructure positioned as a key driver for building social capital.

Phase I of the programme centred on a collaborative research project in partnership with Power to Change, the Institute for Community Studies (ICS) and the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge. The project explored international policy interventions that aim to strengthen social infrastructure to draw out learning useful for UK policymakers, alongside peer research into community definitions and understandings of social infrastructure in the UK. It culminated in the publication Space for Community: Strengthening our Social Infrastructure which brought together the findings of the research.

Phase II builds on the insights from the first phase to explore how social and cultural infrastructure can best be measured and valued, and what role different institutions and sectors play in creating, supporting and enhancing this infrastructure. To achieve this, the Academy has commissioned the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge to investigate how social and cultural infrastructure can be measured to improve understanding of its purpose, presence, scale and value. Additionally, the Academy has commissioned the London Development Trust to carry out a project investigating young people’s views and needs in relation to social and cultural infrastructure.

The Academy is also drawing on insights from six policy research projects funded as part of the Understanding Communities collaboration with the Nuffield Foundation. The six projects are engaging with communities to improve our understanding of the characteristics that make some communities more vulnerable or resilient than others and inform policy and practice on how communities can improve social wellbeing across the UK. The Academy and Nuffield have been delivering a programme of policy synthesis, translation, and engagement across the duration of the funded projects, to promote understanding and learning between research teams and engage relevant stakeholders in the wider body of evidence produced.

Exploring the ways in which digital technologies, tools and practices shape and are shaped by our society, aiming to answer the question of what makes for a ‘good digital society’.

This programme relates to the Academy’s previous work on data governance and artificial intelligence and explores the broad set of ways in which digital technologies, tools and practices shape and are shaped by our society. It also builds one of the seven priority policy goals set out in the British Academy’s 2021 Shaping the COVID Decade policy report to ‘prioritise investment in digital infrastructure as a critical public service.’ Meanwhile, the Academy’s collaboration with UCL Public Policy on AI and the Future of Work identified four important areas for consideration for policy, research and business in this space: cultivating ‘good work’ with AI, understanding how AI can create new forms of disenfranchisement, how AI will feature across sectors and scales of business, and how to develop a future skills base.

The first project the Academy undertook in this programme was an independent project on digital technology and inequality, commissioned by the Government Office for Science in 2022. This project explored the relationship between digital inequalities and existing societal inequalities and examined how advances in digital technology can mitigate or exacerbate existing inequalities, as well as how existing inequalities pose challenges for access and skills related to digital technology. The Academy also engaged in a variety of activities around the UK AI Safety Summit in 2023.

Following this project, in late 2023, the British Academy began a four-stage, multi-year programme around ‘What makes a good digital society?’ This programme set out four consecutive stages of work to address this question, examining:

Possibilities: What are the possibilities of a good digital society?

Principles: What are the principles that underpin a good digital society?

Processes: What are the processes and mechanisms available to implement the principles of a good digital society?

Practices: What does a good digital society look like in practice?

Exploring how the UK can develop effective multi-level governance structures which encourage participation, engagement, and cooperation to strengthen our capacity to identify and respond to local, national and global issues.

The governance, trust and voice thematic programme builds on the Academy’s previous work on the UK constitution and devolution, the Governing England project, and place-sensitive policymaking in projects such as Where We Live Now. It will explore issues of public trust identified in the Academy’s work on Cohesive Societies and how to bring in the voices of underrepresented groups, including those of children and young people as identified through our Childhood Policy Programme.

This programme will explore questions of how the UK can develop multi-level governance structures based on empowering participation, engagement, and cooperation to strengthen the capacity to identify and respond to local needs. This work will interact with the evidence from other themes to consider how to equip decision-making institutions to be more resilient and effective in times of crises and in the face of the present and future challenges.

In March 2024, the Academy published a report on Public trust in science-for-policymaking which was the culmination of the Academy’s independent commission from the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology to investigate and provide recommendations on the issue of trust and public engagement with science to address global challenges. The programme involved two main workstreams. First, two interrelated research projects provided a comparative analysis of across case studies of the conditions, factors and scenarios under which scientific claims are seen as legitimate and trustworthy. The second workstream synthesised insights from across disciplines and wider policy perspectives through a series of focused roundtables and small group discussions within the policy and science communities and across disciplinary boundaries.

What is a good city?

• What are and have been the criteria of a good city? Who makes and has made the good city? What are the values embedded in urban policymaking now and in the past? How will or can the transformation of urban spaces in a decarbonised society of the future open up or effect collective action and democratic processes?
• The good city evokes the good life, however, urban citizens often have lived with ill health, pollution, poor living conditions, fear, anxiety, isolation, crime and helplessness, how can urban life maintain and repair human wellbeing and mental health rather than the opposite?
• What positive measures can a city undertake to make things better for different groups of people to live together? What infrastructural – understood well beyond the physical – decisions can be taken to better the wellbeing of citizens?

Global (Dis)Order:

• Is there a ‘multilateral system’? Can there be an ‘open, liberal world order’ with ‘global rules, norms and standards’? What can a more historical perspective tell us including on how the foundations of international order and multilateralism are shifting and that many armed conflicts are connected to the collapse of empires and the inherent difficulty of establishing new successor states?
• How are the organisations and institutions of global governance related to shifting geopolitical relations and how could these be brought into closer and more stable alignment? What role can there be for transnational governance and regional networks and movements?
• Are there better collective answers to global problems?

Just Transitions:

• What constitutes a just transition? How and by whom should such transitions be designed and led? How can the most profound social and environmental transformations in human history take place in a just and equitable fashion? How will these transitions be experienced and understood differently across societies and communities? How have such transitions been managed in the past and how have and will they be imagined and represented?
• How can political institutions – nationally, transitionally, regionally and globally - be reframed so as to encourage the adoption of forward-looking public policy? What role may there be for green deals or stimuli to support this transition and the COVID-19 response? How might the global economic system support or hinder this? How can a low carbon world be facilitated by human behaviour rather than attempt to be imposed by technological innovation?

A vision for SHAPE research and innovation in 2030

If government ambitions around research are to be realised, new institutions, frameworks and infrastructures will need to be created. It is critical that the SHAPE disciplines play a role in both creating and realising a vision for the research landscape. Contributing to the development of these and learning to excel within the ecosystem they create will be paramount to the future health and success of the disciplines.

The Vision 2030 theme aims to issue a strong voice in research policy over the longer terms under a clear, uniting message for our subjects. The theme brings together evidence from across the higher education and wider research systems to produce timely and insightful interventions to policy debates which effect the health of our disciplines as we move through the decade.

These are broadly considered in three areas:

• The people needed to realise these research ambitions, from graduate skills to research careers
• The practices in which academia operates, including frameworks for assessment, place-based policy, and existing funding structures in higher education
• The principles needed to realise the vision; the allocation of research funding, a move towards Open Access, and the building of an advanced R&D system