☀️ Focus on changing the climate around your policy, not the weather

Focus on changing the climate, not the weather

I often say ‘don’t pay too much attention to the weather -  think about the climate’ when it comes to policy influencing. It’s easy to feel like a setback means everything you’ve done has been washed away. But you have to see a bad day as just that - a bad day - and keep it in perspective as part of a broader timeline for change. Trying to hold that distinction is essential to being a strategic funder.

Using the Multiple Streams Framework

I often come back to the Multiple Streams Framework [John Kingdon’s theory of how policy decisions are made] - not because it’s a perfect description of the world, but because it captures a simple truth and is easy to understand. You're thinking about three things at once: is there acceptance that a problem exists and how is it being framed? Is there a well-evidenced policy solution that aligns with live agendas? And is there political momentum? And then you're thinking about what we can do to influence those streams, and build the conditions to make change possible. 

Evidence and experience are a match made in heaven

Successful policy advocates bring together academic evidence - for lack of a better term - and lived experience, and present the two together. And by doing so, you make each much more compelling. 

They aren’t the only thing that works best when combined

The world doesn't wait for you. Change is happening all the time, and you need to be ready to meet it, take opportunities, and respond to risks as they come. So it's not communications first to set the policy context and then public affairs to secure the policy win, it's about finding a way to do both simultaneously, framing all your engagement in a mutually supportive way.

Have a clear goal, but be flexible in how you get there

We're lucky enough to work with loads of brilliant organisations, and the most effective have a very clear strategy and a strong understanding of the change they want to see in the world, but they stay flexible to the opportunities that come up. They can move between debates on benefits, education, or food strategy, always bringing the same singular goal to each.

Celebrate the small wins

The nature of politics means you're unlikely to achieve the ultimate goal you are working towards straight away. What you often get is incremental change - and sometimes that can feel underwhelming because it falls short of what you were calling for. But we need to get better at celebrating those moments and feeding that back publicly, including to government, as a really positive step forward. 

How can you create a ratchet effect?

Often what you want is a ratchet effect - where you achieve a policy change and then both prevent it from being overturned as well as building on top of it. You do that by celebrating it, evaluating how it’s working, being honest about its limitations, and by fixing those issues and so cementing it in place. That way, when the next change comes, it’s much more likely to ratchet forward rather than loosen or slip back. If the policy change has created issues that you do not fix for whatever reason, you leave that door of valid criticism open which puts the whole project at risk.

The policy community remains overly exclusive

Policy-making is a very exclusive space and there clearly needs to be systemic change to bring in a diversity of people with different professional and personal backgrounds. Without that, you risk having policymaking divorced from a whole range of valuable perspectives, and less receptive to different forms of research and lived experience.

The primacy of politics over policy isn’t good for any of us

Something that bugs me–and I think this is true across all levels of government and all parties, and it’s getting more acute–is the focus on the next election. That's challenging for lots of reasons, not least because it strangles space for leadership and transformational change. Too often it means that public engagement is seen through a narrow lens, like focus groups with swing voters, at the expense of deeper and more participatory approaches. At the start of a new term especially, policy should be primary.

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