Influencing foreign policy and building connections through a civil service secondment

Secondment with the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)

Lee has been working with the FCDO on an ad hoc basis since he started with Queen Mary in 2009. The FCDO initially reached out to Lee based on his area of expertise and continued to contact him over the years for his insights.

Valuing the role academics have in sharing their expertise with the public, media, civil society and government, Lee saw a secondment as an opportunity to share his research expertise while also gaining firsthand knowledge of how policies are made within government.  

From 2022-24, Lee undertook a two-year British Academy-funded secondment with the FCDO. He works with a team of Research Analysts who are subject matter experts with knowledge of geographic areas and thematic policy areas. Acting as an internal think tank, the research analysts play a critical role in supporting civil servants, many of whom rotate into different roles frequently, to help develop policy by providing research and expert advice. Not all the government departments have similar units so the FCDO Research Analysts are also called upon by a number of other government departments from time to time. With Lee’s expertise in China and Southeast Asia, he assists with everything from helping to write ministerial speeches to drafting papers contextualising a policy area, and interpreting things that are happening and how to respond.

Building relationships with policymakers

Lee acknowledged that one of the biggest challenges for somebody who wants to do policy engagement is knowing where to start, especially when government can be so opaque and there's often an element of serendipity of just hoping and waiting. From time-to-time Lee’s own contact with the FCDO has lapsed due to staff turnover, which has required him to rebuild relationships from scratch. 

To address this, as part of his secondment, Lee has established the Southeast Asian Policy Network (SEAPolUK), which is a database of all UK-based academics working on Southeast Asia that do policy relevant research. The goal is to create a brokerage function between the wider expert community and the FCDO to broaden the base from which expertise is sought, moving away from the ‘usual suspects’ with a focus on providing more routes in for early career researchers and academics based outside of London. SEAPolUK should provide a more institutionalised footing to help maintain relationships despite the high turnover of officials. Now that the Network has been launched, the next challenge is sustaining engagement over time when officials are so busy and not all academics understand what policymakers want and frame their work in that way. 

Policy engagement and impact highlights

Lee crafted an impact case study for the 2021 Research Excellence Framework which was based on his work persuading the UK government that Western sanctions on Myanmar were ineffective. The view now is that sanctions are a blunt instrument so the response to the 2021 coup has been much more muted with no broad-based sanctions. Lee has engaged with the government on the topic of Myanmar a lot over the years and can see that policies have shifted over time. While it is difficult to pinpoint exact moments of influence, this steady drumbeat of analysis and engagement has filtered through.

Lee’s work on debunking the myth of Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ has also been influential. This narrative – that China is lending money to developing countries at deliberately unsustainable levels of debt so that China can eventually seize the infrastructure – is no longer accepted within the UK government and the US State Department. While this myth continues to proliferate and has been used to push back against China's Belt and Road Initiative (a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the Chinese government), the message has trickled down to UK policymakers. This is thanks in part to a report that Lee published with Chatham House, the UK’s leading international relations think tank. The cost of publishing with Chatham House has been worth it because their publications come up high on search results, which has been enormously beneficial for the visibility of Lee’s work. As a result, his report has received a lot of readership across government and has been cited in various papers without requiring Lee to do extensive engagement.

Lee’s experiences working on issues related to Myanmar sanctions and Chinese debt-trap diplomacy demonstrates what can be achieved when the right information is published with the right outlet at the right time.  

Lee's tips for getting started with policy engagement

1. Often a key window of opportunity is when the government is working on a new strategy and policy, as this is when they’re most open to expert input and advice. You've got to get yourself into the mindset of officials: understand what they’re working on, what problems they're trying to solve and what kind of information will help them to pursue their policies. While you need to stay true to your research findings, you need to be able to frame your findings in terms of the policy context and in an easily digestible way. Understand the context in which the people that you're trying to impact are operating. Figure out what they're trying to achieve, read the policy frameworks, read the announcements in your area.
2. It’s possible to be critical of policies or decisions, but you must be sensitive about your approach. Especially when engaging officials, it’s important to remember that the policy is largely determined by ministers, with limited room for manoeuvre, especially if it’s already referenced in very high-level strategy documents which are publicly available. Rather than only critiquing all the perceived flaws, a more impactful approach is to understand what officials are trying to achieve and identify areas where policy can be improved and where your research can support. You can still bitterly criticise policy elsewhere, but in an ‘impact’ setting, you will be most effective if you can also point towards possible solutions – even if it is to avoid harm by not adopting the wrong policies. 
3. Find the avenues and the connections into policymaking circles that are relevant to you. For people who work in international relations, the Research Analysts are the natural entry point into government. Many Research Analysts have been academics, so connecting with the relevant Analyst is a good way into the FCDO and from there into wider government. Write to them and introduce yourself, many will be happy to meet for a coffee and help you make further connections. 
4. Raising your visibility with policymaking audiences is crucial – and you have to think about how busy people consume information. Blogs and postings on websites that are actually read by policymakers and officials are very good ways of raising your visibility because they are too busy to read academic articles or books. Think about what non-academic outlets and sector-specific blogs people will read. If your research is policy-relevant, write a 1000-word article based on your latest publication and target it to a blog well-established in that sphere of policy (not a generalist blog or one with a tiny readership). In communicating your research findings, think about non-traditional routes for dissemination and social media. Social media can be very useful: Lee has had various contacts from people who came across his work on X (formerly Twitter).
5. If you want to have impact, you must design it into your project from the start. A lot of academics don’t think about engagement and impact until the end of a project, but if you just write a policy brief without having built up an audience of interested people, it will have less impact. Consider who could be potential ‘end users’ of your research and see if you can work with them at the design stage, or better yet, get them on board as project partners so that there's an institutionalised relationship. There's a delicate balance to be struck, because the project shouldn’t be dictated by the partner: you should be driven by your curiosity and your own intellectual agenda. But you could, for example, consider adding on an additional sub-question or considerations during field work. The effectiveness of co-production for creating genuine impact has led to it becoming a gold standard in research methods. Funding councils increasingly expect applicants to use elements of co-production.

This case study was supported by Audrey Tan (Policy Partnerships Manager, Mile End Institute) and Maja Wawrzynowicz (Policy Associate, Mile End Institute). If you’re interested in learning more about how you can build policy engagement into your own work, check out the Queen Mary Policy Hub’s Learning Resources and Policy Engagement How-To Guides.