Our approach

We think great policy and research has four ingredients.

The best results are achieved when people affected by policies are involved in their creation.

That’s why the Sydney Policy Lab’s prime focus is on and with community. We work alongside people who have been excluded from decision making, leadership and power as they address the issues that matter to them most.

Because diverse expertise leads to better policy, we work across disciplines and lines of difference to pool the knowledge and experience of our collaborators in the community, universities, civil society and government.

As one of the University of Sydney’s flagship multidisciplinary centres, we collaborate with colleagues from every faculty and school with keen interest in their research and delight in the knowledge they create.

We take an experimental approach to intractable real-world problems: formulating, testing and applying our policy hypotheses.

With curiosity, creative methods and a love of storytelling, we seize opportunities to try out new ideas and aim to reshape the conventional ways policy is developed.

Publishing smart-sounding policies in nice reports is not enough. Our work seeks to transform lives by focusing on the issues of greatest immediate and long-term consequence for our communities.

Having collaboratively developed policies, we follow through to share them widely and gain support for implementation.