Merve Uzunalioğlu, University of Oxford, contributes to our Thinking about Resilience series with a new piece exploring the concept of policy labs as a tool for innovative and collaborative policy development. The piece reviews the key characteristics and functions of policy labs, giving examples from existing initiatives, before turning its attention to highlighting three key learnings from the work the rEUsilience project has been doing in its own Policy Lab.
The rEUsilience Policy Lab is a core part of the project, allowing for research and policy thinking to be simultaneously developed and integrated. A key part of the Policy Lab is its two stakeholder panels of which one consists of family representatives from the national level and another of European policy experts. Our panellists use their rich expertise to help identify, develop, and test possible policy changes that would help families. Our next step is reconvening on the 28th and 29th of January 2025 in Brussels to evaluate policy proposals that have been refined by our team of researchers since the last session. Outcomes of the Policy Lab will be made public later in 2025 but in the meantime we are pleased that Merve Uzunalioğlu has been thinking about resilience through the lens of policy labs. Read more about Three Principles to Run a Policy Lab here.