Working both sides of the science policy fence

Fruits of a mentoring process

One day I’d like to write about the mentoring I received from Stephen Pyne in late 2019, facilitated by the International Association of Wildland Fire. It was an incredible opportunity, both personally and professionally, structured around a 10 week series of readings and writing tasks. I managed to flub most of the tasks but it was great fun and taught me a lot, particularly about my own writing process, or lack thereof. I’m actually looking forward to revisiting some of those tasks right here at this Substack at some point. Looking back at the dates of the training, I can see why it feels so long ago, sitting there in the long temporal shadows cast by the Black Summer fires and the COVID-19 pandemic.

For now, I’m sharing a piece that emerged from the mentoring process, which Steve was kind enough to help steer towards a home in Wildfire magazine, the IAWF’s quarterly ‘storytelling and network building’ vehicle for the wildland fire community. Make sure you check out the mag, there’s lots of good stuff there. I have many thoughts about the science-policy interface, most of them not particularly well organised. Here are a few of them.

Fence in Brastadt, Sweden, W Carter (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Australia is on fire, state and federal governments are under pressure, debates over risk mitigation are raging and the elephant of climate change is about to knock down the walls of the room it has been hiding in for the last few decades in an attempt to flee the oncoming fire front. Which is to say, there’s never been a more salient time to work at the science-policy interface. Having stood on both sides of that fence, I can share a few observations which may be relevant.

When I worked as a government scientist, I frequently wrestled with the role of public sector science. Officially it was to provide the evidence base for policy. Unofficially we were couriers, discovering scientific answers (or ferreting out others’ discoveries) and then dutifully delivering them to management and policymakers. There was respect for the special powers we scientists had that were unavailable to other public servants, especially the magic dust of peer-reviewed publications. Yet there was also a clear line over which we could not cross. Because we weren’t great communicators, because we liked to complicate things with words like unless and except, perhaps most of all because we didn’t understand the many other non-scientific factors at play in policy decisions, we were generally seated at the kids’ table, away from the decision-making adults in the room.

This was somewhat unsatisfactory as I was interested in decisions and practical results. I wanted to know what happened before and after science. This led me down the strange path of policy studies, where I encountered the inputs-outputs-outcomes framework. It argued that many government strategies focus on inputs and outputs – dollars spent, reports written, roads built etc. – rather than the actual result of all those efforts: the outcome. The outcome is the reason for policy, the reason for government, the change that we public servants are striving to achieve. The problem is not so much that government departments do not set outcomes (believe me, they do – I’ve read the corporate plans). It is that the outcomes are often exceptionally vague and have little practical relation to the work done within departments.

For example, at one stage the long-term goal of my division was to minimize the impacts of climate change in local communities. This sounds terrific but putting it into practice is hard. It requires understanding and quantifying climate change impacts (on all people? on all things people care about?) in (all?) local communities, understanding how these impacts might be reduced, and then presumably doing whatever is necessary to bring each of these impacts to their absolute minimum.

Overarching goals are often vague and dream-like, but the goal at the next tier down had a similar flavor. The five-year end of program outcome was that government, businesses and the community are building their resilience to climate change. It makes sense that before impacts can be minimized, resilience must first be built. In contrast to the first goal, which set a rather high standard, this one suggested that some action (any action? no matter how small?) was enough for this outcome to be achieved. There was always a point in these plans where these vague and universal outcomes switched abruptly to the completion of individual projects (outputs).

Defining outcomes is hard, Australia National University (ANU) Professor of Strategic Studies Hugh White once told me. “One has to be absolutely ruthless in assessing the relationship between outcomes and outputs. If you cannot establish a very direct causal link between the outcomes you set and the outputs you propose, then the outputs have not been defined well enough.” He said that the most common failings were defining as outcomes things the organization couldn’t achieve, and defining outputs that could not actually achieve the outcomes. Brash and naïve, I decided to rewrite the entire set of corporate goals in a way that met these lofty ideals. They made a bit more sense to me but were not received with enthusiasm by my colleagues in policy.

I slunk back to the kids’ table, where a job ad came across my desk. It was in academia researching bushfires and the primary partners were my old colleagues in government and the fire management agencies. I now had an opportunity to peer across the science policy interface from the other side of the fence.

Unlike in government, there was little doubt about the boundaries between science and policy making. Academics may strive to work closely with “end users”, but there are no illusions they have any say in management decisions. On the other hand, we have something that public servants, and especially public sector scientists, do not: an ability to speak freely and widely about our research and its implications, thus influencing those same policy decisions after all. It has also neatly flipped the procurer-consultant paradigm from my time in government. Previously, external consultants may have been uncharitably typecast as greedy, overpromising and underdelivering hacks. Now an academic, the uncharitable stereotype is of public sector procurers as confused, unrealistic and incompetent hacks.

Working on a few projects from within academia has deepened my sense of the fence. Partners in government and fire management occasionally struggle to separate the concrete contractual obligations of a project from the general sense that university scientists are there to do whatever the agency wants them to do. I suppose this is not wildly different from the expectation in the community that public servants are there to do whatever the people want them to. The outcomes framework is now being visited upon academics, increasingly encouraged to provide hard evidence of their societal impact beyond dusty journals and conferences. Meanwhile, even as public servants struggle with a complex array of forces pushing them in every direction, the public service and its political masters remain largely immune to serious attempts to formally measure the outcomes of their work, whether by the goals they profess or some other standard.

Sadly, my time on both sides has not delivered me an overarching theory or well-defined outcome for working at the science policy interface. It has given me a useful rule of thumb, however, which is that relationships are critical. Major initiatives which have undoubtedly helped to transform the public understanding of climate change impacts in New South Wales had their seeds in relationships, in repeat meetings, phone calls, coffees and lunches, road trips and hallway strolls. My manager at the time could have rebranded himself as a relationship guru if he wanted – he charmed, he told tall stories [Ed.: I immediately regretted using this expression after seeing it in print], he connected with people. He left in one of many restructures, his expertise and relationships, like so many others, lost to the department in the conceit that what mattered were job descriptions and capability frameworks, not individual people.

On the other side of the fence, when the Rural Fire Service Commissioner opened the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub, a multimillion dollar partnership between academia and government, he spoke not just of the daunting challenges of contemporary fire management and the world-leading research of the institutions involved. He spoke about the peace of mind he got from being able to pick up the phone and just chat with the Hub director (my boss at university) whenever he needed to. Although I haven’t been in academia as long, I have no doubt that research projects on this side of the fence rise and fall not just on the strength of their science or the soundness of their policy goals, but on the connections made and not made between human beings.

I can’t say that one side of the fence is better, or more effective, or fulfilling than the other. I’d like to see more of us work both sides. It makes it easier to see where people are coming from. And even as some are working to break down silos and enable cross-sector mobility, there is something to be said for a nice, solid fence. Good fences establish useful boundaries and, so long as they aren’t too tall or electrified, can even make good neighbors, as Robert Frost once said. As for me, I like wide fences. Sitting on the fence isn’t always comfortable or popular, but the views are great and there’s no better way to see both sides.