Policies for promoting university-community engagement in practice

This chapter explores policies by which governments have attempted to shift their higher education systems to situations where their universities are more structurally engaged with excluded communities. The central argument to this chapter is that there has been a tendency by governments to fund activities rather than system shift, and by exploring four examples which have–however tentatively–begun this process of system shift, it is possible to get an insight into the potentials and barriers to effective university–community engagement. This chapter explores four community engagement higher education policies: the Dutch Leading Social Institute for Urban Research (Nicis Institute), the Canadian Community–University Research Alliance (CURAs) programme, the English HEIF 3 Quantum and the UK Beacons for Public Engagement. This chapter notes that structurally funding community engagement by universities is an extremely expensive and long-term process. Where policies do not fit with universities’ existing activities, single project rounds—even long term ones like the CURAs or the Beacons–have difficulties in evolving from being discrete project interventions into wider cultures of valued public engagement within universities.