Ideals and practicalities of policy co-design – developing England’s post-Brexit Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes

There are few examples of where co-design has been applied to active policy development on the scale or level of complexity of England's post-Brexit Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. ELM offers a fascinating ‘laboratory’ to analyse how co-design at this scale works in practice. This paper offers the first in-depth empirical assessment of the process from the perspectives of both the policy makers and stakeholders who were involved in the initial phase of ELM co-design from 2018 to 2020. Using interview data, we provide critical insights for both academics and government on 'pragmatic' applications of co-design to active policy development and reflect on what this tells us about the wider processes of policy development that may need to change in order to accommodate this more ‘democratic’ approach. Our analysis, which identified key barriers to co-design as articulated by institutional stakeholders and civil servants, revealed a mismatch between the principles and practices of ‘co-design’ in the initial development of ELM. These early-stage challenges included: (i) a lack of shared decision-making and empowering stakeholders to contribute to problem-definitions; (ii) confidentiality requirements that introduced barriers to information-sharing; (iii) insufficient transparency and feedback on what happened to stakeholder's contributions in terms of policy development; (iv) an absence of detail on the schemes, including proposed approaches, payment rates, advice, baseline measures, the kinds of ‘outcomes’ expected, and monitoring mechanisms; and (v) a repetition of themes that participants had already discussed. Many of these mismatches may be common to other policy arenas. We argue that improved application of policy co-design in government will rely on wider changes to political processes and the institutional culture and practices within the civil service.