(please feel free to rephrase the headline) A policy brief is a succinct document which presents research data and findings to a non-academic audience. It is also a way to explore an important, perhaps complicated, contentious or recent issue and for drawing out the key lessons that emerge from the research. Finally, it offers advice or recommendations for improving policy.
In the Assessment 2 you are expected to develop the outline you wrote for Assignment 1 into a final policy brief about issues related to the module’s contents. If, for any reason, you feel a need to change the topic for this second assignment, you could still do it; but in this case you will not be able to benefit directly from the feedback on your policy brief outline in Assignment 1.
Remember:
To link your topic/argument to materials from the module.
To be as specific as you can, both with regards to the topics you explore
To think about how you frame your recommendations to match your intended audience interests and capacities.
To use simple, accessible, and appropriate language, avoiding jargon as much as possible.
For this final policy brief, you must:
Identify an issue, topic or problem which is clearly linked to one of the weekly topics (all of which showcase examples of policy briefs) to focus your policy brief on.
Identify who would be the target of your policy brief, for example an institution or type of institutions, which you aim to inform and influence. Your target could be governments, NGOs, local traders or trade unionists, local authorities, a parliamentary group, members of the clergy, a civil society group, etc.
Indicate how academic ideas discussed during the module can be translated into policy recommendations.
You should refer to relevant theories and concepts presented in the module, and complement them with additional supporting evidence/key references to take a position in relation to the different perspectives on the issue
Make sure you draw on and use some of the key references referred to in the key concepts for this module. In the References section, within the Annex, you have to include not just the particular resources from which you extracted information for the policy brief, but more generally all the resources you consulted while writing your assignment. Please also include resources from the course that have “inspired” most your policy brief work, even if they were not directly applied to it.
Provide policy recommendations, which should be evidence-based, actionable, concrete and targeted to the interest and capacities of your intended audience.
For this Assessment, the final policy brief, you can use the following suggested headings as a template:
Front page:
The first page of a policy brief is intended to ‘‘catch the attention’’ of potential readers and provide the most essential information to those who will just have a look at it (and maybe later read the details that follow). The first page may also work as a reminder of the key ‘‘message’’ of the policy brief if, after having read it, somebody later turns back to the first page. Therefore, we propose the following elements:
Title – descriiptive and self-explanatory. You could consider using a subtitle.
Teaser (optional) – something very succinct – a quote or quotes, a question, or a fact that raises curiosity.
Recommendations – in bullet points. These are an “abridged” and stand-alone version of the “policy recommendations” that appear later.
Picture/image – relevant and captivating.
Main two pages:
Overview (optional) – brief synopsis (like an abstract) of the policy brief, summarising the problem it addresses, its overall evidence-based approach and the key recommendations.
Introduction – a compelling presentation of the issue, its context, gaps in current policy, and why it matters and requires urgent action.
Research findings – relevant concepts from the literature, data and facts, and how they help to solve the problem, providing the basis for the recommendations.
Sidebars, quotes and boxes – use these elements to highlight important aspects of the issue or the solution and increase the visual attractiveness of the policy brief.
Use additional visual aids – as required, including white space, simple graphs/charts and images.
Last page:
Summary statement – the key concluding arguments, which provide closure for the argumentation, just before the proposed actions suggested in the policy recommendations.
Policy recommendations – clear recommendations possibly aimed at specific policy sector/s.
Further reading – four or five key readings on the topic (eg: links to reports from prestigious organizations or authors, journal articles, specific studies of relevance, websites etc. The “further resources” provided should aim, to some extent, to reinforce the credibility of the policy brief).
Assignment Annex (not included in the word count):
Includes additional reflections and the references for the policy brief. This content would not typically appear in a policy brief, but in the context of this assignment it will help readers/markers understand it better.
Key audience – explain who the intended audience is and why you have chosen them.
Framing of the issue – explain how you framed the issue and why you chose to frame the issue in this particular way. You could also include a stakeholder map.
References – list references to all the sources you consulted to write the policy brief. In a policy brief “in-text referencing” or footnotes are normally avoided to make the text more readable. While the policy brief includes a “Further readings” section, which provides links to key resources that the reader could consult, this may feel insufficient if as part of your evidence you are providing some hard data (such as percentages, diagrams, etc.), which you would normally need to reference directly as the source of the data (your marker may desire to look at these sources). A possible solution, in the context of this assignment, is to number the list of references included in the annex. In case it is needed, you could thus insert the number of a source in the text, as a superscriipt, like this32. By doing it in this way, the text will read easily, but you will still be able to indicate to the marker where the data comes from.
A live session dedicated to Policy Briefing with an expert from IDS takes place during the week 2. Another live session takes place on week 6 to discuss the markers’ and the peer-feedback for your first assignments and Q&A on the final assignment. Please make sure you attend the sessions or check the video recordings. Finally, we also have a dedicated forum discussion for “Questions on the assignments” where queries and doubts on the assignments will be responded.
