IPPO Newsletter No 16: ESRC Funding Announcement 2023-2024, How Governments Used Intelligence During Pandemic, Misinformation & Social Capital in Cities

December 3, 2022

Welcome to the latest newsletter from the International Public Policy Observatory (IPPO).

Please join our upcoming events on how governments organised and used intelligence during the pandemic and strategies to tackle the negative effects of public health misinformation.

Our IPPO Cities team will also be holding an event on how cities can better cultivate social capital.

Events

How Governments Used Intelligence for Decision-making During COVID-19 (Tuesday, December 6th, 13:00-14:00 GMT)

This event will mark the release of the International Public Policy Observatory’s report on how governments across the world used intelligence to make decisions during the pandemic. The report will provide valuable insights for policymakers and experts in government decisionmaking, learning from the COVID-19 pandemic to consider best practices for future crises.

During this event the research findings will be presented by the project lead Professor Sir Geoff Mulgan, followed by expert commentary from:

Ed Humpherson: UK Director General for Regulation, Office for Statistics Regulation
Paula Graciela Daza Narbona who led Chile’s pandemic response as Undersecretary of Public Health and is Executive Director, Center for Public Policies in Innovation in Health (CIPS), Faculty of Government, Universidad Del Desarrollo
Dame Juliet Gerrard : New Zealand Prime Minister’s Chief Scientific Advisor, New Zealand
Dr Rob Orford, Chief Scientific Adviser for Health for NHS Wales

There will be opportunities to ask questions of the research team and the panel.

IPPO Cities: How do Cities Cultivate Social Capital? (Thursday, December 8th, 15:00-16:00 GMT)

IPPO Cities’ final event of 2022 tackles the initiatives and interventions that cities can take to encourage and enhance social capital.

Our expert panel of city policymakers and innovators will provide their insights on mechanisms to promote volunteering, mainstreaming social capital at a strategic level, the benefits of social action, and social innovation.

Confirmed speakers include:

Alice Wilcock, Assistant Director – Civil Society and Sport, and Carla Garnelas, Senior Manager – Civil Society and Volunteering, Greater London Authority
Adrian Nolan, Lead Officer – Industrial Strategy, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority
Amalia Zepou, co-founder of NPO KOLLEKTIVA and former Vice-Mayor of Athens for Civil Society and Innovation

The event will include a panel discussion with the opportunity for audience Q&A.

Debunk, Inform or Avoid? When might debunking be effective in communications aimed at countering vaccine-related misinformation? (Thursday, December 15th: 14:30-16:00 GMT)

During the pandemic, public health communicators faced a common challenge. How to ensure the spread of vaccine-related misinformation did not impede the vaccine roll-out and risk lives?

Since July 2022, IPPO has been developing a rapid evidence review that will look at when debunking misinformation about vaccines is likely to be a better option than either providing accurate information only, or not responding, for:

Reducing people’s vaccine-related misinformation beliefs, or vaccine hesitancy.
Changing people’s attitudes to vaccines; and/or
Increasing people’s intentions to be vaccinated, or vaccine uptake?

During this online roundtable, we will share and discuss key findings and recommendations from this rapid review with interested policymakers and practitioners, with observations from our event chair Matthew Flinders, director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield; Abigail Emery, head of behavioural science at the Cabinet Office, and Jeremy Williams, who is leading IPPO’s work on monkeypox and how policymakers can best learn from social sciences research to inform their handling of the outbreak.

Blogs

There’s lots to read on IPPO’s website right now related to our research and policy work: