Co-creating policy knowledge

One of the aims of this journal is to influence and challenge policymaking in higher education by publishing high quality original research and analysis which explores the implications of findings for the development and implementation of policy. This is challenging enough for an international, peer-reviewed academic journal, but especially so for one that encourages in-depth accounts which are significantly longer than the standard journal article. Discussions of impact often revolve around the format and mode of communication and the translation of academic discourse into more popular modes such as summaries, blogs, podcasts and opinion pieces that might be more likely to be picked up by policymakers than academic manuscripts. Valuable though this may be, a more profound and comprehensive approach would be to reconsider the interactions between academic research/ers and policymakers (broadly conceived to include institutional, sectoral, national and international actors) and how policy knowledge can be co-created through these. It may be productive to consider this issue through the prism of university engagement and knowledge exchange and the longer-term relationships and collaborations that academics and researchers can have with the policy community. In the past, universities have had a tendency to promote an ‘expert’model that prizes academic, and especially scientific, knowledge above other forms of understanding and learning, particularly those in professional disciplines, which are often devalued, and even dismissed by academia. Applied research which addresses problems and issues that face policymakers is too often not regarded as ‘real’ research. Despite calls to consider all talents (Boyer 1990; VSNU, NFU, KNAW 2019), ‘expert’ research continues to dominate the career and reward structure of universities, in particular, research funding, peerreviewed publications and patents. On the other hand, many policymakers are looking for an evidence-base for solutions to problems they and society face. They are often clamouring (silently) for help and some would welcome new and radical thinking, but ‘they are not super-interested in deep empirical explanations of why they are wrong’ (McMurtrie 2014). The ability to understand the policy challenges and the exigencies of making and implementing policy – combined with academic expertise – is a stronger basis for exercising influence and authority and expanding the ‘Overton window’ of political viability (Mackinac Centre 2019). These contrasting perspectives of ‘expert’ and ‘applied’ research can hamper constructive dialogue and collaboration between universities and communities, government, businesses and non-profit organisations (Firth and Nyland 2020). The elitist approach to knowledge has tended to be further distorted by the rhetoric and reality of marketisation and reputation-building into a transactional mode of knowledge exchange which regards knowledge as an asset to be transmitted, translated and even commercialised. This has also generated expectations for individual academic researchers to engage with stakeholders in particular ways in order to achieve ‘impact’ and exerts pressure on them to produce tangible outputs, in the form of income, markers of reputation and other outcomes regarded as ‘valuable’ bymany universities. In the higher education market, knowledge exchange and engagement – the ‘third mission’ of