Case study: Professor Corwin Wright
My placement was in the Research and Evidence Directorate of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), starting in March 2024 and finishing in December. The FCDO is the UK’s ministry of foreign affairs and incorporates both our policy towards other nations and, following reforms in 2020, is the UK’s ministry for international development. It occupies a rather grand high-Victorian building on Whitehall, squeezed between Downing St on one side and HM Treasury on the other and sitting at the geographic heart of government.
During the placement, I was based in the Climate, Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) group. This team of about ten people is very much on the ‘D’ side of the FCDO, and designs and operates development programmes across a range of countries within its topic area. As such, weekly team meetings would usually involve hearing about a massively diverse range of topics, from emerging tropical cyclones in the Caribbean to household fuel use and water access in Africa.
My day-to-day academic research is on the physics of the atmosphere, focussing on the fundamental dynamical behaviour of the Earth’s stratosphere and mesosphere. Oddly, this is not a central topic of CEEW or the FCDO’s work! However, after some mutual negotiation we found uses for my technical knowledge and skillset, and during my nine months (at one third time) I wrote three reports on environmental topics for dissemination within the FCDO and government more broadly. I will be staying on at the FCDO on a smaller time commitment than during the placement for a few months to help support take-up of these reports within government.
Due to my technical knowledge on the climate system, I was also invited to assist in other areas outside the FCDO as and when needed. A particularly interesting one was providing technical review for the UK’s new Climate Science Narrative, a document outlining the current state of our knowledge on climate change, and my work here led to a formal credit on the document for my university. I also represented the FCDO at an external meeting where the chair was someone I know professionally through my research, which was a quite bizarre experience for both of us!
During my placement I usually went into the office 1-2 days a week, with one of those days usually being for the weekly team meeting. This was easier for me than it would be for some – I live within about ninety minutes of the FCDO by train and tube, making these day trips manageable. The working environment was very different than I was used to – at the University I have my own office and my day is mostly meetings, whereas the Civil Service mostly operate open-plan hot desks and my day was mostly reading and writing – and it took some time to adapt to this, but I think (!) I did by the end.
This placement was both interesting and a fascinating opportunity for civic engagement, something few of us have the proper opportunity to do given time demands and the complexity of modern society. It was also an opportunity to experience a very different style of working – and a challenging one to handle timewise given that, as a lot of my normal role is management, my day job didn’t really go away at all during this time! A lot of my time on the placement was spent synthesising existing evidence, and as such I think the main benefit for me was seeing how the Civil Service uses research; I expect to use this knowledge in my future work.