Transforming public policy with engaged scholarship: better together

Abstract

Many people remain invisible in all stages of policymaking processes and are re/harmed by policy decisions made in their absence, even where public engagement has occurred. This lack of meaningful engagement affects those experiencing homelessness, migrant workers, northern and Indigenous women, and others with whom we have collaborated. This article demonstrates the transformative potential of recognising these ‘invisible’ actors as legitimate and effective actors in the policy process. In this article, we present a series of Canadian research vignettes, emerging from our empirical research programmes, that illuminate the possibilities for the principles of engaged scholarship to advance transformative, community-driven policymaking. Along with other critical policy scholars, we are concerned about how power circulates and is distributed unequally through public policy. Our focus in on how commitments manifested through engaged scholarship can disrupt these power distributions. Through our vignettes, we demonstrate how principles of engaged scholarship can shape public engagement, the understanding of policy problems, the creation of evidence, and the development of meaningful policy solutions. This article makes an important contribution on how to improve the processes of public engagement in policy development.

Transformational change through Public Policy

“…Take for example Boullosa et al (2022) who identify lessons contributing to the Brazilian community of Paraisópolis' successful community-based governance in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, including proximity coordination, collective learning and affectionate rationality. Levac et al (2022) provide similar insights in their tips for engaged scholarship in improving policy processes, especially in disrupting existing community power distributions. Their recommendations are not only about what makes a community successful but they offer deeper insights on what makes a policy scholar successful in engaging with communities, including collaborations in understanding problems and finding solutions.…”

“…3. Transformational change often requires policy changes across sectors and levels of society, from local communities (Boullosa et al, 2022;Levac et al, 2022;Joy and Vogel, 2022) to national or global communities (Nohrstedt, 2022;Tosun et al, 2022;Sewerin et al, 2022). 4.…”

“…It is perhaps telling that three of our contributors to this special issue have indeed chosen to focus on various types of grassroots actors in analysing transformational change (Boullosa and Peres, 2022;Joy and Vogel, 2022;Levac et al, 2022). These contributions highlight how communities of engaged citizens can make their own (informal) public policies (Boullosa et al, 2022), social (urban) movements can be a force for change (Joy and Vogel, 2022), and people can (in collaboration with policy scholars) solve community problems (Levac et al, 2022). To put it differently, it is not that policy studies focuses on the wrong things, but rather that its ability to understand and foster changes in policy and society would be enhanced with a broader lens.…”

“…Thus, while policy scholars observe radical shifts in public attention and policy activity linked to social movements, the emphasis tends to be on the broad time scales necessary to justify such claims rather than on the mechanisms driving the change (for example, Baumgartner and Jones, 2016;. Boullosa et al (2022), Joy and Vogel (2022), and Levac et al (2022) all show how policy scholars can draw lessons from specific cases of citizen engagement and social movements to think more deeply about the drivers of transformational change.…”

“…The point is that questions of what works under what circumstances are of great interest to those seeking transformational change, and public policy scholarship should have much to offer here. Again, we return to Levac et al's (2022) work on engaged scholarship as exemplar in speaking to people beyond the usual suspects.…”