Policy is key to students future job prospects- need skillz

(Janet Banfield, Sam HamptonORCID Icon &Monika Zurek, all Geo@Oxford, Towards a pedagogical policy turn in geography Journal of Geography in Higher Education Volume 46, 2022 - Issue 2)

25 years after Harvey’s intervention, debate raged in the 2000s as human geographers contemplated the character and desirability of policy impact. Martin (Citation2001) explained geographers’ limited influence on policy through a turn towards theoretical rather than empirical work, and called for a new “geography of public policy”. Dorling and Shaw (Citation2002) sympathised but argued that a policy turn was unlikely because geographers do not value it, are not good at it, and are not validated by policy makers. Ward (Citation2005, Citation2006, Citation2007) expanded the debate by highlighting impactful geographical contributions, including refuting normative notions of relevance, which focused too narrowly on policy audiences and short term, measurable impact. Public geography, by contrast, concerns itself with diverse publics and multiple modes of scholarship, including activism, participation, and pedagogy. Students, he argued, are our “first public, for they carry geography into all walks of life” (Ward, Citation2006, p. 500). Subsequently, and re-articulating the value of participatory scholarship (Pain, Citation2003, Citation2004, Citation2006), Pain et al. (Citation2011) expressed concerns that the forthcoming UK Research Excellence Framework assessment (REF) would entrench elitist notions of impact and underplay community knowledge exchange. Since this flurry of frustration, the policy debate amongst human geographers has subsided, and Martin’s vision of a “policy turn” has not materialised, although the relationship between geography and policy impact continues to attract comment, with (for example) physical geographers embodying critical reflexivity and concern for policy relevance through the emergence of critical physical geography (Lane, Citation2017; Lave et al., Citation2018); and transdisciplinary concerns surrounding anthropogenic environmental change reigniting disciplinary interest in the value of an explicitly geographical perspective (André, Citation2017; Schwanen, Citation2018). Nonetheless, the residue of the earlier debate constrains geography’s potential to make meaningful policy impact. Ward’s (Citation2006) criticism that geography is too focused on policy audiences encourages us to cast our eyes elsewhere, while both Martin’s (Citation2001) call for a geography of public policy – while encouraging active engagement – and Dorling and Shaw’s (Citation2002) lament seemingly objectify policy as something to be studied rather than practised by geographers. It is hardly surprising that Pain’s (Citation2003, Citation2004, Citation2006) advocacy of participatory research in social geography has not translated into policy work, if policy is seen as external and to be critiqued rather than practised. This, though, conflicts with blossoming undergraduate interest in and demand for more practically oriented educational experiences to prepare them for engaging with pressing issues of environmental and social justice beyond the ivory tower. Geography graduates pursue myriad careers, and many aspire to policy roles, typically in sustainability, international development or spatial planning. Currently, geography is growing (in the UK), with GCSE, A-Level and undergraduate entries in England increasing since 2010 (Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Citation2020). At the same time, the diverse skills developed by geographers are attractive to employers across varied sectors (Prospects Luminate, Citation2020), but how sustainable can this be if the type of policy work to which students increasingly aspire is conspicuously absent from the policy work to which they are exposed in their curricula?