How can fiction and poetry be utilized by activists and policy makers to critically assess and improve policy processes and outcomes?

Though the processes of policy engagement have recently rapidly and significantly developed, decision
tables are still dominated by those who rarely live the problems people in the UK face. This decreases
political engagement, increases mistrust in leaders, and can potentially lead to ineffective and
unsustainable policy solutions. Fiction and poetry is currently under-utilised within the policy engagement
world, and merely used as a tool of political propaganda, when it can also be used to bring people
together, understand lived experiences, and be itself a powerful evidence base for policy makers to gain
further insight in order to implement more effective solutions. This research will explore and provide
practical recommendations to answering:
1) How can fiction and poetry be utilized by activists (Extinction Rebellion, The Intersectional
Environmentalist) and policy makers to critically assess and improve policy processes and outcomes?
2) How can fiction and poetry be used to connect policy and activist agents for better public policy
engagement?
2) What impact can/does fiction and poetry have on shaping individual and collective attitudes to key
social and environmental issues, and how does this influence political behaviour in policy agents and
activists?
In critically evaluating the standpoints and perspectives of both activist(s) organisations and policy
agents, we can utilise fiction and poetry in a way that allows for the facilitation of a critical space to
challenge individual and collective attitudes, further extending fiction and poetry's function in politics to
generate more effective, implementable and sustainable policy solutions.