Including impact as part of the assessment of academic excellence in the UK has forcefully drawn the attention of universities to the relationship between research and policymaking. ICS will also form part of the forthcoming 2021REF and ‘doing impact’ has now become part of the workload and performance goals of many academics. While the central tenet that academics do have influence on the world around them is not disputed, the necessity and ability of capturing said effects has been questioned and the resulting criticisms will be discussed later in this chapter. Yet, the relationship between research and policymaking has been the subject of much debate long before the REF2014 (among others Blume, 1977; Weiss, 1979; Nutley et al, 2007; Head, 2008; Cairney, 2016). Much of it has been located in the field of policy analysis and the focus has been on the extent to which policymaking has been based on and informed by research. Thus, in contrast to the REF, EBPM places policies and policymaking at the centre of the analysis rather than the work by individual/groups of researchers. The aim of this chapter is to bring the two discussions together, i.e. to discuss the relationship between academic research and policymaking by placing the expectations and criticism of impact as part of the REF2014 in the broader literature of EBPM.

REF2014: measuring the impact of academics

The inclusion of impact as an assessment category in the REF2014 in the UK marked the first time that the work of academics was going to be assessed against criteria beyond the research environment and publications (HEFCE, 2012). Adding impact as an additional measure of academic excellence was mentioned in the review of the research assessment exercise in 2006 (HEFCE, 2012, see also Williams and Grant, 2018). The stated rationale for adding impact to the REF2014 was to ‘develop and sustain a dynamic and internationally competitive research sector…that makes a contribution to economic prosperity, national wellbeing and the expansion and dissemination of knowledge’ (in HEFCE, 2009: 38, cited in Williams and Grant, 2018: 97) and to judge universities using a ‘balanced scorecard’ (Smith et al, 2011: 151– 152).