Putting people at the heart of policymaking? Here are our rules of engagement

As the UK gears up to a General Election later this year, one of the big questions facing politicians and policymakers is how they can gauge the public mood and respond to it effectively. This is particularly important now, when politics — and public opinion — seem more polarised than ever before.

Our mission at The Liminal Space is to create positive change in society. We have always collaborated directly with the individuals and communities affected by the health, science and work issues we focus on. But it has become increasingly clear that public engagement is only part of the story. Over the last couple of years we’ve learned that teaming public engagement with policy action can be a powerful lever to effect positive change.

Want to know more? Here are five things we have discovered through our work with funders, businesses, researchers and communities that we believe can radically transform policymaking.

1. Policymakers need to identify and solve real problems. Learning needs to start from the ground up.

To succeed, a policy needs to genuinely address the reality of people’s lives – not how we think they live. At Liminal, we focus on directly engaging people with lived experience of an issue, rather than developing ideas and solutions in isolation – an approach which leads to higher impact.

Night Club is our most fully-developed public policy campaign to date, and offers a perfect case study. 

Night Club aims to influence national action for people who work at night. Since 2018 we have engaged with 10,000+ night workers across 50+ employers. They tell us what would make a meaningful difference to their lives and we provide this feedback to their bosses and to policy actors including ministers. 

As a result, we have helped build cross-party consensus to improve the working lives of night workers and inspired Select Committee recommendations.

2. Traditional research can feel extractive and is often counterproductive. Enable people to be active participants.

No-one wants to feel that they are merely a research subject from whom insight is extracted. We’ve found that most people want to play an active part in achieving positive change, especially once given the agency to do so.

The Job Design Lab, developed with ALT/NOW and with support from Impact on Urban Health, takes this approach. While Job Design Lab provides rich insights for funders, businesses and civic organisations to plan their future strategies, and ultimately results in a tool for policymakers (in local and national government) to explore career transition pathways, it also helps individuals to consider their own skills and explore new technologies and ways of working, enabling individuals to be part of shaping the future of work.

3. Policymakers need help to imagine new ways of doing things. Immersive learning environments are a powerful tool.

It is widely recognised that experiential learning has greater impact than traditional didactic content for knowledge retention. For over a decade we have been creating immersive environments built on a foundation of rigorous research, and have seen the power of this approach as a tool for learning and inspiration.

One such example is our recent project with The Health Foundation, which brought questions of how to approach carbon reduction in the NHS to life for healthcare policymakers.

We created a near future scenario with three distinct immersive spaces that imagined the individual, organisational and national challenges of achieving a Net Zero NHS. Rather than simply being confronted with a large amount of information to consider, this approach enabled participants to step inside an alternative future in a multisensory way, offering greater insight and perspective, and enabling greater understanding not just of the issue at hand, but also of the political and social environment in which policy decisions must be made.

4. Facts are not enough to create change. Powerful storytelling wins hearts and minds.

It is easy to drown in data and theory. Often it is stark and simple stories, with real faces and identities behind them, that really connect. Think about who exemplifies your issue and how you can create a compelling and inclusive space to share those stories – first hand if possible.

In his 2022 book How Minds Change, the writer David McRaney explored the science behind how and why people’s opinions can be swayed. The stark reality, he learned from a study of subjects in an MRI machine, was that bombarding people with facts doesn’t work – it instead sparks a fight-or-flight mode and an adrenaline rush.

The recent ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office illustrates this idea clearly. Most of the salient facts about the Horizon software scandal at the Post Office had been known by MPs for years. Facts alone were not enough to create change. However, a well-told story, about one man’s fight for justice, captured the hearts of the public and politicians alike and sparked a demand for change.

Our project with the charity SHiFT, which works to break the destructive cycle of youth crime, underlined this approach for us. Facts and data could only do so much; it was the stories of those involved that really captured the imaginations of visitors to Shifting Perceptions, our exhibition on London’s Southbank, and inspired stakeholders, policymakers and funders to act.

5. Big policy changes will fail without public support. Use arts and cultural moments to bring the public along with you.

Inertia is a powerful force. Policymakers and politicians can find it hard to bring about meaningful change if the social conditions aren’t right. Even the best ideas and most well-intentioned policies will struggle without popular public support. 

The shift in public opinion around climate change over the past two decades is one of the clearest examples of this dance between policy and public engagement. On the long road towards net zero, cultural convening has played a key role in shaping and shifting attitudes in tandem with policy initiatives.

In our recent collaboration with the Natural History Museum entitled Our Broken Planet, we worked with curators to engage a young adult audience on the topic of climate change. Alongside receiving over one million visitors, the exhibition was used to convene global policy actors, including Greta Thunberg, ahead of COP26.

The project was a finalist in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Action Awards and was credited with “flipping the script and demonstrating impact on shifting behaviour”. 

Creating the future

As we near a crucial political crossroads, this creative approach to public engagement and policy action feels more vital – and necessary – than ever if we want to imagine a different future and make it a reality.

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