A guide to policy engagement and influence
For many international development organisations, influencing policy is a critical means to achieve long term change. For over a decade, the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) team at ODI has worked around the world to understand how to foster sustainable policy change. The result is ROMA – the RAPID Outcome Mapping Approach – a guide to understanding, engaging with and influencing policy.
What is ROMA?
Many organisations working in international development want to contribute to policy change. These may be small non-government organisations working to improve health care for a marginalised group or large research institutions trying to improve urban planning: whatever their size or purpose, one of the ways to cement the changes they desire is by influencing policy. Policy change can take many forms: while changes to legislation are often seen as the most concrete ways of making change happen, in fact public policy comprises many non-legislative issues, such as regulations, resource allocation and decisions about whose voices to include in debates or what evidence to base decisions on.
For the past decade, the RAPID1 team at ODI has been working with a wide range of organisations in a wide range of contexts to understand how to foster sustainable policy change. The result is – the RAPID Outcome Mapping Approach – which is the subject of this guide. ROMA is an approach to improving your policy engagement processes, to influence change. It comprises a suite of tools that any organisation can use at any stage in their policy engagement process to improve how they diagnose the problem, understand the types of impact their work could have on policy-making, set realistic objectives for policy influence, develop a plan to achieve those objectives, monitor and learn from the progress they are making and reflect this learning back into their work. This guide to ROMA summarises what the team has learned over the years.
It is worth noting that ROMA draws heavily on the concepts underpinning Outcome Mapping (OM). Developed in the early 2000s, OM is an approach to fostering change that centres on understanding how different actors behave and how changing the behaviour of one actor fosters change in another (see Box 1). The context within which policy change happens is a complex one, happening with a range of different actors at different levels, as Chapter 1 outlines. Over the years, the RAPID team has found that OM-based approaches help organisations navigate this complexity to understand how policy change really happens and what they can realistically hope to achieve. In the team’s experience, OM-based approaches perform better in this regard than approaches based largely around delivering specific outputs to specific deadlines.
