
The internship will be hosted within the Scottish Government’s Office of the Chief Economic Adviser (OCEA), specifically in the Directorate for Chief Economist’s OCEA: Business Economic & Sector (BES) team. This team provides economic analysis support to DG Economy, working alongside policy advisers, statisticians, and researchers. The internship will involve providing analytical and data analysis support for the delivery of the Scottish Government’s National Innovation Strategy, with project details tailored to the intern’s skills and the team’s specific needs.
Improving impact assessments to support the use of evidence in Scottish Government policy making
This internship forms part of an exciting cross-government programme to enhance how policymakers take account of the impacts of their decisions on different people, organisations or places. Working in a small team led by Chief Social Policy Adviser Professor Linda Bauld, but engaging with multiple policy and analytical areas, the candidate will contribute to a high profile programme of actions to develop the system of impact assessments within the Scottish Government. The team has a strong track record of hosting successful SGSSS internships.
Trust in government: building an evidence base for Scotland
Scottish Government has access to a range of data sources that provide direct and indirect evidence on levels of trust in government and potential contributing factors. This internship will focus on analysis that draws these together to build up a picture of levels of trust in government – and drivers of this – across different areas, demographics and protected characteristics in Scotland. We are interested in evidence from both quantitative and qualitative data sources, and there may be opportunity to carry out new qualitative work. It is intended that this project will result in a publishable report that provides a literature review of existing evidence on trust and sets out new analysis resulting from the project. Evidence based recommendations for improving Scotland’s evidence base on trust in government will also be welcomed, along with a presentation to relevant Scottish Government staff and stakeholders.
Breaking down silo working – designing a systems approach to the process of developing food policy and creating metrics to assess effectiveness.
This project provides an exciting opportunity to work in a cross-cutting and dynamic policy area. The purpose of this project is to consider how to translate this novel legislative requirement into the day to day working practice across the Scottish Government. The project will identify options for how to embed a process of collaborative and cross policy working in relation to food policy across the Scottish Government. The project will also consider how the effectiveness of this process can be measured.
Putting the evidence in evidence-informed policy making
This project centres on communicating research evidence to a broad audience, to showcase how evidence informs policy. The intern will take source material from internal presentations and external policy-related publications from the last 2-3 years. They will use this to write a narrative briefing note telling the story of how evidence has shaped policy design, delivery and evaluation in a priority area (Programme for Government priorities: eradicating child poverty; growing the economy; tackling the climate emergency; ensuring high quality and sustainable public services). The objective is to demonstrate evidence-informed policy making in action, by communicating how evidence has underpinned policy in these priority areas. The outputs should be accessible and engaging for a broad audience including policy officials, Ministers and external stakeholders.